Santa Arias

Looking to the Southeast Antilles: Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra's Geopolitical Thought in his Historia geográfica, civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (1788)

Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra’s Historia geográfica, civil y natural, completed in 1782 and published in 1788, is widely seen as the founding colonial history of Puerto Rico’s national history. This essay examines this imperial and comparative account, which cannot be dissociated from Abbad y Lasierra’s first important writing, his Diario del viaje a América completed in 1781. I argue that his observations and reflections on the condition and prospects of Puerto Rico are deeply influenced by his travel in the Caribbean’s southeastern circuit and, in addition, his readings of Spain’s foreign polemical detractors, in particular Guillaume-Thomas Ábbe Raynal and his Histoire philosophique et politique. This essay also sheds light on Bourbon dynamics in Puerto Rico and Abbad y Lasierra’s appeal to Romantic liberal creoles seeking abolition of slavery and sovereignty from Spain in the nineteenth century. Thus, the basis of Puerto Rican patriotic identity is found in Abbad y Lasierra’s intellectual appropriations sustaining his ideas on rational development and progress for the island.