‘The Spanish empire used notions from animal breeding for human beings — this suffused racism’

Mackenzie Cooley is associate professor of history at Hamilton College. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke, she explains hierarchies about animals — and humans:
What is the core of your research?
I specialise in the history of science and ideas. I look at where these intersect and bloom in the early modern period, often in unexpected ways. Much of my work focuses on the era spanning 1300 to 1800. I specialise in the 16th century — that’s right at the end of Leonardo da Vinci’s life, the beginning of the American engagement for Europeans, the Columbian voyages and the rise of big natural history publications.
SUDDENLY HUNTED: Peruvians nurtured llamas (L) and alpacas (R) with care — to Spanish imperialists though, both seemed alike and thousands were mercilessly slaughtered for bezoar, a ‘cure’ later found to be ineffective (Photos: Getty Images & iStock)

Can you tell us the story of bezoar then — and why this remains important now?
Bezoar was a mineral growth that developed in the digestive tract of animals. It was used as a panacea, an antidote to everything in that era. It developed in certain ruminants, like goats, especially those from Persia and what Europeans then thought of as the Indies, but also in llamas and alpacas. The hunt for bezoar led to one of the most astonishing animal executions ever as Europeans wanted to extract new stones from llamas and alpacas in South America. Bezoar is a very cautionary tale — it was one of the biggest medical commodities of the time, extremely valued, a perfect gift for a king, but it was also ineffective and not understood to be so until the 19th century. Its history should give us pause because sometimes, the biggest medical markets are built on dubious foundations. It’s extraordinary how many animals were slaughtered for bezoar. Spanish colonialists killed thousands of llamas and alpacas in Peru just to grab these stones inside — which, in any case, only appeared in a small percentage of animals. This led to some of the most significant population bottlenecks seen in New World camelids because the Spanish did not appreciate how different llamas and alpacas were from one another — they lumped them all together as the ‘sheep’ of the Indies. They were not remotely sensitive to how these individual populations had been nurtured by the Incas and other residents of the Peruvian world.
‘IMPERFECT’: Empires vs natives (Photos: Getty Images & iStock)

How was the Spanish empire shaped by ideas of ‘perfect animals’?
When we think about the past, we must reckon with how entirely these were animal worlds — the Renaissance was built on animal power, labour and animals as signs of nobility. The Spanish were very interested in tapping into Italy’s cultural expertise then. They turned to Italian fashions to create the best world for themselves. That perforce included horses as this was a society where the term forn‘nobility’ was tied — as knight, caballero and chevalier — to horsemanship. Many grand houses, including the Gonzaga of Mantua in Italy, bred carefully honed horses and gained prestige by marketing them. The ‘perfect’ animal was thought to be best suited to its place in what was conceptualised as ‘the great chain of being’, a very widespread European idea of a highly precise hierarchy.
Breeders would carefully measure if their animals then achieved the goals set within this framework — did they run the fastest, learn dressage quickly, etc. These breeders had the ear of monarchs who were making decisions for Europe and subsequently, empires — they were very keen to understand how the tools of animal breeding could be used to improve human populations. So, over the course of the Spanish empire, we start to see a language once used for describing domesticated animals, of ‘raza’ or race, extended to human beings. This is a key transition — some of the zoological terms used in the Spanish world, like ‘mestizo’ or a mix, were now used for people. As European colonialism expanded, these ideas of race, initially used for animal breeding and meant to indicate short-term characteristics, were increasingly used for humans. It started signifying fixed characteristics and differences between people — that suffused racism.


Did these ideas influence colonialism?
Absolutely. That vision, of the ‘perfection’ of animal breeding, requires an awareness of fixed hierarchies — the ‘perfect’ horse is so because, to a Renaissance mind, it achieved everything a horse should. This formed a hierarchy about what different types of beings could and should do — and they could then be perfected within their categories. Thus, the Spanish empire grew more hierarchical. While animal breeding was meant to be a path for improvement, it actually narrowed down the potentiality of nature, devaluing things like nurture or education — a human simply could not escape these fixed categories.

Did commodification, growing over this time, also impact such views?
Colonialism and commodification came together. Over the course of the Spanish empire, there was a transformation of an interest in landscapes and nature to its counterpoint — a list of commodities which could be traded across time and space.
‘PERFECT’: The Lusitano breed was prized (Photos: Getty Images & iStock)

Mercantile economies trading sugar wheat were therefore a radical reduction of biodiversity. Colonial science first took stock of the wonder of the natural world — and then winnowed it down to a commodity, alienated from its origins, reduced from its grand state to something stunted.