Historia economico-politica y estadistica de la Isla de Cuba, o sea de sus progresos en la poblacion, la agricultura, el comercio y las rentas

Havana, Las viudas de Arazoza y Soler, 1831. Small quarto (17.7 x 23.5 cm). 2 unnumbered leaves, xiii pages, 2 unnumbered contents leaves, and 386 pages.

Contemporary half binding, spine with false raised bands decorated with gilt fillets and floral tools, marbled paper boards. Joints split, corners and spine rubbed, with small losses of leather at the foot; marbled paper worn. Small loss of paper affecting the flourish of the final letter of the word "auteur" in the inscription.

First edition of the Historia económico-política y estadística de la isla de Cuba, Ramón de La Sagra's first major survey of the island's population, agriculture, trade and public revenues. The volume was produced by the widows Arazoza and Soler, official printers to the Government and Captaincy General of Cuba, the Royal Treasury and the Real Sociedad Patriótica.

An important presentation copy, inscribed by Ramón de La Sagra to the French naturalist and explorer Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny. The inscription brings together, in the very book that anticipated La Sagra's later encyclopaedic undertaking, two of the principal figures responsible for its zoological sections.

Their careers had first unfolded in different parts of Spanish America. Established in Cuba, La Sagra directed the Havana Botanical Garden and held the chair of agricultural botany. His research encompassed not only the island's natural productions, but also the economic and administrative structures of the colony. D'Orbigny, travelling on behalf of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, explored South America from 1826 to 1833 and assembled a vast body of zoological, geological, geographical and ethnographic material. He returned to France in January 1834, shortly before La Sagra settled in Paris in 1835.

The date and precise circumstances of their first meeting remain unknown. The inscription may have been added after the two men became acquainted within Parisian scientific circles, when La Sagra began gathering the specialists required to study the collections he had brought from Cuba. Whether it preceded or accompanied their formal collaboration, the presentation records the relationship that was soon to unite them.

The 1831 work was already far more than a straightforward statistical account. Drawing upon official censuses, particularly that of 1817, La Sagra examines population trends, agricultural structures, colonial crops, shipping, foreign trade and public revenue. Statistics become the foundation of a comprehensive description of Cuba, intended both to measure the island's transformation and to provide its administration with an instrument of knowledge and government.

This first synthesis formed the intellectual basis of the monumental Historia física, política y natural de la isla de Cuba, the vast collaborative publication begun in Paris towards the end of the 1830s and continued for more than two decades. La Sagra enlisted several of the leading French naturalists of his generation, including Achille Richard, Camille Montagne, Jean-Théodore Cocteau, Gabriel Bibron, Alphonse Guichenot and Félix-Édouard Guérin-Méneville.

D'Orbigny's contribution was fundamental. He wrote the Ornithology, published in 1839, the volumes on Molluscs, issued progressively between 1841 and 1853, and the section devoted to Foraminifera. These studies were based upon the specimens and materials collected in Cuba by La Sagra, to which d'Orbigny brought the experience acquired during his long South American expedition.

The inscription therefore carries particular significance. La Sagra presented d'Orbigny not with a volume resulting from their completed collaboration, but with the book that preceded it and already contained its central ambition: to encompass Cuba as a whole, from its population and agricultural wealth to its birds, shells and microscopic organisms.

La Sagra's later career extended far beyond natural history. After returning to Europe, he increasingly turned towards social and economic questions, entered into dialogue with Proudhon and participated in the reformist debates of the 1840s. This development was not entirely separate from his Cuban research: in the statistics of 1831, as in his later writings, the systematic study of society remained the necessary prelude to its transformation.

An important association copy, bringing together through an authorial presentation inscription two explorers and naturalists of the Americas at the threshold of their major collaboration. Within this first general survey of Cuba can already be discerned the encyclopaedic undertaking to which d'Orbigny would contribute some of his most substantial zoological studies.