Resumen

ESTEFANE JARAMILLO, ANDRÉS. LA PROYECCIÓN NACIONAL DE UNA EMPRESA IMPERIAL: LA EXPEDICIÓN MALASPINA (1789-1794) EN CHILE REPUBLICANO. Historia (Santiago) [online]. 2005, vol.38, n.2, pp.287-326. ISSN 0717-7194.  http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0717-71942005000200003.

The investigations of the members of Malaspina's Expedition (1789-1794) during its stay in the Gobernación de Chile will not only be useful in the immediate time frame, but also in the postcolonial period. That is understandable because throughout the XIX th century, the republican authorities, out of necessity, had to make use of the information generated by the scientific expeditions of the Enlightenment- and specially Malaspina's- to face the lack of updated information in geographical matters, to solve territorial disputes with bordering countries and to sponsor new explorations aimed at getting to know accurately the characteristics of those zones recently integrated to the national sovereignty. The sustained recovery of the registers handed over by said retinues will give birth to a new link up between the last century of colonial domination and the first of our republican history, point at which the sciences will play a fundamental role in making the nineteenth-century Chile be the trustee of and give a new sense to the geographic knowledge generated in the previous century

Palabras clave : Traveller; geography; science; Republic.