An expansive biography of William (or Guillermo, as he is known in South America) Miller, a soldier well-recognized and loved not just in modern Peru but across the swath of nations liberated from Spanish rule during the nineteenth century. 

During Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s demolition of imperial Spain’s naval presence in the Pacific amid the revolutionary wars for Spanish South America, all the raids were carried out by his marines under a young officer called William Miller. One of three sons of a baker in a small village in Kent, with no family influence, money, or even secondary education, he came from nowhere, but he went on to have a meteoric rise in the armies that liberated the nations of Chile and Peru. By the time of Ayacucho in 1824, the large battle that ended Spanish rule in South America, there were seven generals in the royalist Spanish army and five on the patriot side. Eleven of these generals were Hispanic; Miller was the only foreigner.

Set in the context of the great European powers’ weakening grip over their global empires and the ensuing wars of independence in Spanish South America, John Hemming’s gripping narrative spans Miller’s time as a teenage soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular War, his contribution to the liberation of the new nations Chile and Peru, and his years in diplomacy thereafter. Drawing on written accounts by many of Miller’s contemporaries in addition to a wealth of modern research, Hemming casts the anti-imperialist, anti-slavery soldier as highly regarded by all the leaders of independence and popular with ordinary people and peasant farmers due to his own humble origins—a legacy evidenced by his burial in the Pantheon of founding fathers of Peru decades after the battles in which he made his name.
 

Missionary Scientists explores the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries in colonial Spanish America, revealing a little-known aspect of religions role in the scholarship of the early Spanish Empire. Grounded in an examination of the writings and individuals authors who were active in South American naturalist studies, this study outlines new paths of research often neglected by current scholarship.

What becomes clear throughout Missionary Scientists is that early missionaries were adept in adapting to local practices, in order to both understand the scientific foundations of these techniques and ingratiate themselves to the native communities.

Spanning the disciplines of history, religion, and Latin American studies, Missionary Scientists reshapes our understanding of the importance of the Jesuit missions in establishing early scientific traditions in the New World.