This book examines the efforts of Spaniards and Portuguese to attract Native peoples and other settlers to the villages, missions, and fortifications they installed in a disputed area between present-day Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The first part examines how autonomous Native peoples and those who lived in the Jesuit missions responded to the Indigenous policies the Iberian crowns initiated following the 1768 expulsion of the Society of Jesus. The second part examines military recruitment and supply circuits, showing how the political centers’ strategy of transferring part of the costs and delegating responsibilities to local sectors shaped interactions between officers, soldiers, Natives, and other inhabitants. Moving beyond national approaches, the book shows how both Iberian empires influenced each other and the lives of the diverse peoples who inhabited the border regions.
French naturalist and medical doctor Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) was one of the most important scientific explorers of South America in the early nineteenth century. From 1799 to 1804, he worked alongside Alexander von Humboldt as the latter carried out his celebrated research in northern South America, but he later returned to conduct his own research farther south. A Life in Shadow accounts for the entire span of Bonpland's remarkable and diverse career in South America—in Argentina, Paraguay (where he was imprisoned for nearly a decade), Uruguay, and southernmost Brazil—based on extensive archival material. The study reconnects Bonpland's divided records in Europe and South America and delves into his studies of rural resources in interior regions of South America, including experimental cultivation techniques. This is a fascinating account of a man—a doctor, farmer, rancher, scientific explorer, and political conspirator—who interacted in many revealing ways with the evolving societies and institutions of South America.
The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.
From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.
"[A] most impressive achievement by an extraordinarily intelligent, courageous, and—that goes without saying—'well-read' mind. The scope of this work is enormous: it provides no less than a comprehensive, historically grounded theory of 'modern peoplehood,' which is Lie’s felicitous umbrella term for everything that goes under the names 'race,' 'ethnicity,' and nationality.'" Christian Joppke, American Journal of Sociology "Lie's objective is to treat a series of large topics that he sees as related but that are usually treated separately: the social construction of identities, the origins and nature of modern nationalism, the explanation of genocide, and racism. These multiple themes are for him aspects of something he calls 'modern peoplehood.' His mode of demonstration is to review all the alternative explanations for each phenomenon, and to show why each successively is inadequate. His own theses are controversial but he makes a strong case for them. This book should renew debate." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University and author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.
This engaging text offers a brief, readable description of our common Western heritage as it began in the first human societies and developed in ancient Greece and Rome, then through the Middle Ages. Providing a tightly focused narrative and interpretive structure, Brian A. Pavlac covers the basic historical information that all educated adults should know. His joined terms "supremacies and diversities" develop major themes of conflict and creativity throughout history. The text is also informed by five other topical themes: technological innovation, migration and conquest, political and economic decision-making, church and state, and disputes about the meaning of life. Written with flair, this easily accessible yet deeply knowledgeable text provides all the essentials for a course on Western civilization.
In Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective, eleven historians bring their knowledge and insights to bear on the long Braudelian sweep of Southeast Asian history. In doing so they seek both to debunk simplistic assumptions about fragile traditions and transformational modernities, and to identify real repeating patterns in Southeast Asia's past: clientelistic political structures, periodic tectonic and climatic disasters, ethnic occupational specializations, long cycles of economic globalization and deglobalization. Their contributions range across many centuries: from the Austronesian expansion to the Aceh tsunami, and from the Sanskrit cosmopolis to the Asian financial crisis. The book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Peter Boomgaard, a scholar whose work has embodied the Braudelian spirit in Southeast Asian historiography. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access.
In 1604, Pope Clement VIII despatched a delegation of Discalced Carmelites to Persia to exhort Shah Abbas I to join an alliance with him. Thus began almost two hundred years of Carmelite activity in the region. During their time there, the Order not only bore witness to the great Safavid dynasty and its demise: they also amassed a huge written record. Herbert Chick's two impressive volumes present an important collection of these writings. The records provide an unparalleled source of detailed information on the politics, diplomatic rituals, foreign policy concerns, and matters of court ceremony of the time, including correspondence between the Popes and the Shahs. Now extremely rare, the work remains an invaluable resource for scholars. This new edition contains an introduction by Rudi Matthee, an acknowledged authority on Safavid Persia.
