Scientific Statecraft

This chapter examines a collaboratively produced publication, Sinopsis de familias y generos de plantas leñosas de Filipinas, published in 1883 by Sebastián Vidal, a Catalan botanist, and Regino García, a Philippine-born employee of the Jardín Botánico de Manila and trained artist. The Sinopsis compiles families and genera of Philippine flowering plants and includes an illustrated atlas of some 1,900 plant figures. Relying on García’s visual ingenuity, which was informed by the local contours of arts education and production in Manila, the work became part of Spain’s scientific statecraft as the country angled to position itself as an intellectually competitive empire in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. A scientific and artistic achievement, Sinopsis, the chapter also proposes, should be considered part of the canon of the Filipino Enlightenment of the late nineteenth century for its innovative knowledge-claims that disrupted conventional, foreign representations of Philippine plant life.