In broad terms, European students of the history of Latin America have concentrated their researches upon colonial policies, interactions between Europeans (and their American‐born descendants) and indigenous peoples, economic and commercial structures, and political life (whether of elites or, more recently, of subaltern groups). The last two decades have witnessed a significant expansion in Britain and elsewhere of research into gender studies and cultural studies. Although the latter discipline embraces an awareness of the importance of the history of science, this has tended to be rather narrowly focussed upon travel writing, and the extent to which there were links between the promotion of scientific travel and both imperial and national projects, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, like the great British scientific travellers of the nineteenth century in Latin America, the works of cultural studies specialists tend to reveal more about European attitudes and misconceptions than Latin American reality.
The quest of Mexico for a distinctive national identity throughout the 19th century reached a climax during the period known as the Porfiriato, one of the principal features of which was the deep desire of Porfirio Díaz and his circle to turn Mexico into a 'modern' country perhaps without a clear definition of the meaning of this concept. The debate about national identity had addressed such issues as the rejection of indigenous cultures, blind passion for French culture, and how to go about criating a modern nation by means of industrialization and scientific modernization. The concept of nation in Mexico is definitively linked with the search for a national 'I', and with the struggle to overcome the solitude identified by Octavio Paz. Paradoxically, this very quest forms a part of this identity, and it seems to remain inconclusive.
Conscious of the need to explain clearly the fundamental ideas of Spencer, as a preliminary to establishing what ‘the scientists’ made of them, this chapter concentrates upon his theory of evolution. This serves in part to reveal the differences between his philosophy and that of Comte and other important thinkers in Britain and elsewhere of the nineteenth century. It also shows how Spencer gathered together the knowledge and the notion of the world as part of a universal system governed by immutable laws, which ever since the time of Isaac Newton, had been present in British culture, shaping the identity of Victorian Britain, which Spencer captured and unified in order to give it a universal meaning. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the reasons for the popularity of his elegant model for the universe, led by the immanent law of evolution, with tycoons in the United States such as Andrew Carnegie and Edward Livingstone Youmans, who provided him with financial support
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