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This article explores the Spanish crown's efforts to study, cultivate, and transplant
spices from the East Indies to the West Indies and then to Spain in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Christopher Columbus's first observations
of New World flora, the Spanish crown sought out spices to cultivate for economic
gain. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in efforts to generate a large-scale
spice trade, colonial officials and local entrepreneurs participated in a coordinated program
of empirical information gathering and botanical experimentation that is itself of
historical significance. For the empirical and experimental—"scientific"—methods
they represented serve to challenge and enhance current understanding of several historiographical
themes: the origins of economic botany and the Scientific Revolution
more generally, the role of human agency in the Columbian exchange, and the dissemination
of knowledge from imperial centers to colonial peripheries.