The Advices of Giovanni Battista Gesio in Philip II’s Court: an Asian Spices “Industry” Between Natural Philosophy and Cosmography
Abstract
Throughout his life in Italy, Spain and Portugal, the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista Gesio († 1580) was author of some conspicuous ideas related to the Cinquecento natural history and the imperial Iberian cosmography. Attentive to Brazil, India, Japan and China, in the 1570s he proposed to Philip II to carry out an initiative that no other Christian or Muslim prince could undertake. The idea was to transplant the production of spices and drugs from Asia to Spanish Indies, an enterprise presented as an "industry" worthy of such a monarch. The occasion allows us to approach models of Iberian universalism when imagining a world whose nature can be put into circulation not only as a resource, but also as a metaphor of imperial power.
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