Are Official National Agencies Always State-Run? The Jesuits and the Sciences of Meteorology and Seismology

In some countries with limited domestic state scientific-institutional capacity, national meteorological and seismological services acquire characteristics that distinguish their history from those of Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. A well-known pattern in the latter is that of a central observatory or institute originally under academic or military management being transformed into an official state agency of meteorology or seismology during the second half of the nineteenth century or later. Against this backdrop, this essay offers a new, complementary perspective based on the unique circumstance that, in some countries, these services did not depend on state or government agencies, but on a private and religious institution: the Society of Jesus. Using examples of services in three different scenarios, both colonial and republican, that occurred in the Philippines and Cuba under Spanish and American rule, and in the independent republics of Colombia and Bolivia, this essay examines the variety of motivations behind the delegation of public services to the Jesuits, such as trust, familiarity, and scientific authority. While these categories partly explain the relational logic of such delegations, this article argues that the Jesuit epistemic network gave the Society a competitive advantage over the State. It became a negotiable asset—cognitive, technological, and institutional—whose value was perceived differently by the host State. These examples demonstrate how the asymmetry between the pre-existing Jesuit network and the lack of state infrastructure was the condition of possibility for the various modalities of delegation examined (colonial organic, co-optation, and sovereign delegation).