Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (review)
conquest of Mexico to a discourse on imperial power. He agrees with recent interpretations of these images that emphasize the importance of the idea of succession and of the translatio imperii by which Moctezuma voluntarily relinquished his empire to Charles V via Cortes as the king's representative. He posits, however, that these images may also be read as glorification of the Spanish monarchy's authority rather than as expressions of local or proto-national history. Finally, in chapter five, the author examines constructions of Spain's "Universal Monarchy" through an analysis of a group of cartographic and allegorical representations of the world produced in New Spain. Such imagery, he argues, points to the development and circulation of different conceptualizations of global space in seventeenth-century New Spain.