| Summary: | This article shows that the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), by Jesuit historian José de Acosta, anticipates the famous work Cosmos (1845) by Alexander von Humboldt, as a generic, programmatic and even philosophic model for the conceptualization of a global climate science. This reading emphasizes the importance of the global networks of knowledge that, through complex processes of acquisition, translation and dissemination, inform the majority of early modern natural sciences canonic works. The history of these knowledge and translation networks also shows evident continuities between the naturalist work of Acosta and Humboldt, Finally, this article also suggests that the early history of Earth Systems science, the discipline that attempts to understand the interactions between the world’s physical, chemical, biological and social systems in a holistic manner, must include the historiographical tradition of the Early Americas, from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
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