Race,Nature and History in Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas and El Español de Ambos Mundos

This article revisits the Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas published in Paris by Colombian intellectual José María Samper in 1861. It does so by positioning it in the context of the newspaper in which it was initially published in instalments: El Español de Ambos Mundos. Hitherto both this newspaper and its close conceptual connection to the Ensayo have been overlooked. The simultaneous reading of EAM and the Ensayo also serves to signal similarities and differences in racial thinking on both sides of the Atlantic, while contributing to the increasing interest among scholars in studying how miscegenation was endowed with different meanings according to the context in which it was considered.