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Nineteenth-century republicans across the political spectrum agreed: the Spanish monarchy produced ‘miserable Indians’. Abolishing tribute and privatising communal lands, known as resguardos in New Granada (roughly today's Panama and Colombia), would transform that wretched class into equal citizens. Drawing on late eighteenth-century privatisation efforts by the Spanish Crown, early republican leaders in Gran Colombia inaugurated an era seeking equal access to wealth from communal land for all indigenous community members. After Gran Colombia (the first Colombian Republic, 1819–30) dissolved into New Granada, Ecuador and Venezuela in 1830, New Granada's experiments with indigenous resguardo policies went further. By then, legislative efforts considered the needs of all resguardo members, including unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Complex laws, diverse ecological terrain and nuanced social realities required well-trained surveyors to ensure each eligible indigenous family received a fair share of land. Whereas indigenous communities in Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley resorted to armed insurrection against liberal policies through the War of the Supremes (1839–42), those in the highlands near Bogotá did not. Instead, these republican indígenas – with their greater access to the levers of power housed in the national capital – chose to engage in the reforms of a decentralising state. This article reveals how contentious experiments seeking republican equality within indigenous resguardos as a path towards abolishing the institution were consistently stymied by efforts to ensure that indigenous community governance and communal landholding remained intact.

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and the United States to present and discuss their work on the history of various aspects of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge production, including cartography, astrology, shipbuilding, natural history, medicine, and public health. Several invited senior scholars, whose research interests resonated with those of the participants, offered commentary, suggestions, and probing questions. Lively debates ensued concerning the similarities and differences of the various geopolitical Atlantics, as well as the epistemological and methodological implications of looking at the history of science and medicine from an Atlantic perspective. Although most of us had arrived at Harvard prepared to discuss the role of the Americas in ''the advancement of European science and medicine,'' a great deal of what we did actually served to challenge the assumptions implicit in the seminar's title. We came to be far more interested in understanding how transatlantic interactions shaped and were shaped by processes of knowledge production, and we became fascinated by the implications of using the Atlantic as a unit of analysis in the history of science, medicine, and technology. As a result, much of our discussion focused on recent models developed by scholars in Atlantic history could recast the received narratives of the history of science and medicine � an enterprise we might call an Atlantic history of science. 2 Equally intriguing for us, however, was the notion of a history of Atlantic science: rather than importing a methodology from Atlantic history, we felt we could create a new series of questions by redefining what knowledge was in the first place and questioning the circumstances of its production. For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interac tions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ''Atlantic science.'' We recognize, of