The various Atlantic and European entanglements of the age of Latin American independence make it difficult to establish solely “Iberian” perspectives of the events culminating in the independences. Nevertheless, this essay proposes four distinct periods, mostly based on developments in Iberian politics, including the Peninsular War and its aftermath, when elites in Spain and Portugal advanced distinct views and solutions to the crises unfolding in the Americas. Certainly, the situation was not the same in Spain and Portugal. Still, the many cross-pollinations in Spanish and Portuguese politics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century permit the use of shared chronological benchmarks. Indeed, the years of the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, and the distinct challenges that the events in this six-year period created, loomed large in subsequent debates about imperial preservation, sovereignty, rights, and relations within the Iberian Empires. Large-scale, multisited, unrest in Spanish America since 1810, prompted the proposal of political and military solutions to guarantee the integrity of the empire and of what some viewed as a trans-Atlantic “Spanish nation.” In Portugal, the debates revolved around the lasting consequences of the royal family’s relocation to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, and anxieties about the status of Portugal itself within the reconfigured empire.

This chapter picks up in the 1920s where it follows the campaign of scientist Leonid Kulik to reach the site of the blast. After gathering various pieces of information about the 1908 event, Kulik set off to find the location of Tunguska. This endeavor proved more difficult than expected as the desolate taiga of Siberia remained inaccessible on his first several tries. Yet Kulik’s doggedness was well-suited for the remoteness and severity of the Tunguska environment. Aided by Evenki guides and the work of a handful of other researchers, Kulik finally made it to the epicenter in 1927. His team undertook another, more extensive, expedition the following year. Despite this success, the Tunguska taiga and the cosmos continued to exert a major influence on the research of field scientists, while public attention helped turn Tunguska into a mystery.

Continuing chronologically, this chapter picks up the story of the expeditions of Leonid Kulik in 1929 and follows Tunguska research through World War II. A desire to figure out the source of the destroyed forest fostered a set of distinct ecological interactions at the blast site. Workers and scientists began draining waterlogged holes in the ground in search of meteorite fragments, collecting rock samples, and planning an aerial survey of the location. At this stage scouring and manipulating the environment to find a space rock took precedence. Thwarted by political intrigues, environmental obstacles, and the lack of large remains, the mission to find a meteorite proved unsuccessful. While a pattern had now been established in terms of how to engage materially with the Tunguska site, the mystery of what had happened there only deepened.

This chapter focuses on colonial military ventures against frontier communities, which were widely deployed throughout the nineteenth century. It foregrounds previously overlooked debates between administrators and soldiers on dynamics of state and tribal violence in Baluchistan, the Naga Hills, and along the Punjab frontier. Despite environmental and social differences, in northeast and northwest alike, administrators frequently argued that violence could be a method of educating ostensibly refractory tribes, which could be punished legitimately as a corporate body. The colonial also often employed frontier inhabitants as agents of colonial violence, deriving an unstable form of power from the very methods it derided as barbaric. The chapter shows that this was just one of many tensions within colonial frontier violence. Many administrators viewed it as ineffective, believed that it threatened the moral basis of imperial rule, and advanced contrasting conceptions of an individualised tribal subject.

This chapter illuminates the role of science in colonial expansion since the time of the Enlightenment, as well as the varied forms of contestation, creative appropriation, and counter-science among the colonized.