Lina Del Castillo is assistant professor of history and Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). You can read her new article “Entangled Fates: French-Trained Naturalists, the First Colombian Republic, and the Materiality of Geopolitical Practice, 1819–1830” in HAHR 98.3.