The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela

The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela

Author: José de Oviedo y Baños

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0520377389

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This classic in the literature of the European exploration and settlement of the New World has never until now been available in the English language. Its author, born in 1671, was descended from a noble Spanish family and was a learned and influential member of Caracas society. His Historia de la conquista y poblacion de la provincia de Venezuela is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece and a major historical work. It has been read and acclaimed throughout the world. Jeannette Varner's sensitive translation will be welcomed by English-speaking Latin Americanists everywhere. The work is an accurate and absorbing narration of the early history of Venezuela, from Christopher Columbus's arrival on August 1, 1498, on his third voyage to the New World, until its sack by the British corsair, Sir Francis Drake, at the end of the sixteenth century. Based firmly on the histories of official chroniclers and early historians of Venezuela, its first four book are a matchless introduction to the subject and provide valuable background for scholarly study. The last three books, dealing with the bloody struggle for the domination of Caracas and its vicinity, constitute Oviedo's original contribution to the history of Venezuela. Widely divergent subject matter ranges from the ghastly crimes of the tyrant Lope de Aguirre, who murdered both his priest and his daughter, to the mystic transfiguration of Martin Tinajero, whose body attracted swarms of wild bees with its odor of honey. In his Letras y hombres de Venezuela, Arturo Uslar Pietri calls the book a "song of pride in race and love of the land, an elegy full of sentiment and melody." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.


Empire, Colony, Genocide

Empire, Colony, Genocide

Author: A. Dirk Moses

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2008-06-01

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 1782382143

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In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”


German Conquistadors in Venezuela

German Conquistadors in Venezuela

Author: Giovanna Montenegro

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0268203202

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This fascinating study traces sixteenth-century German colonialism in Venezuela through the lens of racialized capitalism and the subsequent memorialization of the period through to the twentieth century. Giovanna Montenegro investigates one of the strangest and often-ignored episodes in the conquest and colonization of the Americas––the governance of the Province of Venezuela by the Welsers, a German banking family from Augsburg, in the sixteenth century. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book chronicles the Welsers’ business expansion beyond banking to colonization and the slave trade in the Spanish Indies and the eventual failure of the colony. Montenegro follows the money that financed the Habsburg empire, tackling a multifaceted, multilingual corpus of primary documents. She examines numerous legal documents, from contracts granting colonization and slave trade rights (capitulaciones, asientos) to complex financial transactions (interests, exchange rates). She also analyzes maps, literary texts, and various chronicles and poems of the period. The book examines a history of violence perpetrated upon enslaved Indigenous and African people, but it is also the story of how different generations across the Atlantic, up to Nazi Germany in the twentieth century, have remembered and recalled this Welser period of governance in Venezuela to serve other social and political purposes. Montenegro positions her research in relation to current critical discussion on inequality, slavery, White supremacy, and neoconservative nationalist movements in contemporary Latin America and Germany. German Conquistadors in Venezuela is a stimulating read. The book will appeal to Latin Americanists, Germanists, early modernists, and scholars and students interested in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and memory studies.


Colonial Fantasies

Colonial Fantasies

Author: Susanne Zantop

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1997-09-10

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0822382113

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Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany’s colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without colonies—in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of "Germans" with "natives" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany’s colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory—or love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others.


The History of Venezuela

The History of Venezuela

Author: H. Micheal Tarver

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13:

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An indispensable resource for readers interested in Venezuelan history, this book analyzes Venezuela's economic crisis through the context of its political and social history. For decades, the economy of Venezuela has depended on petroleum. As a consequence of a reduction in the price of oil, Venezuela recently experienced an economic downturn resulting in rampant social spending, administrative corruption, and external economic forces that collectively led credit-rating agencies to declare in November 2017 that Venezuela was in default on its debt payments. How did this Latin American nation come to this point? The History of Venezuela explores Venezuela's history from its earliest times to the present day, demonstrating both the richness of Venezuela and its people and the complexity of its political, social, and economic problems. As with all titles in The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series, this chronological narrative examines political, economic, cultural, philosophical, and religious continuities in Venezuela's long and rich history, providing readers with a concise yet up-to-date study of the nation. The volume highlights the country's wide variety of cultures, languages, political ideologies, and historical figures and landmarks through maps, photographs, biographies, a timeline, and a bibliographical essay with suggestions for further reading.


The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas

The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas

Author: Robert J. Ferry

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0520414128

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Combining traditional documentary research with new analytical strategies, Robert J. Ferry creates a rich, three-dimensional picture of early Caracas. His reconstitution and interpretation of important genealogical histories provide a model for historical studies of Latin American and other societies. Ferry’s work partially eclipses previously accepted ideas about colonial Caracas. He shows how the society was dominated by a commercial-agricultural elite and demonstrates that women were responsible for arranging marriages and maintaining family lineages, that marriages among first cousins were very common, and that elite residence was matrifocal. The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas focuses on the salient features of the society and economy: agriculture, commerce, and labor. The first section treats the seventeenth-century transition from Indian encomienda labor to African slave labor. The society created by slavery and the cacao trade in the eighteenth century is the main subject of the second section of the book. Throughout, Ferry leads the reader to a deeper understanding of the elite planters of Caracas, who were wheat farmers in the seventeenth century and cacao hacienda owners in the eighteenth. Ferry also explores how some families suceeded in retaining wealth and local authority from one generation to the next. That success is momentarily halted in the 1730s and 1740s, and the revolt of Juan Francisco de León in 1749 is viewed as a crisis of both the colony’s elite and the smallholder, immigrant class to which León himself belonged. The response to León’s rebellion represents a major effort on the part of the Spanish crown to restructure royal authority in the colony, arguably the first of the Bourbon reforms in the American colonies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.


A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820

A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820

Author: John K. Thornton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-10

Total Pages: 563

ISBN-13: 0521727340

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An overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830, describing interactions between the inhabitants of Africa, Europe and North and South America.


A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, Volume 2

A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, Volume 2

Author: D.R. Woolf

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-30

Total Pages: 940

ISBN-13: 1000849104

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First published in 1998. Including a wide range of information and recommended for academic libraries, this encyclopedia covers historiography and historians from around the world and will be a useful reference to students, researchers, scholars, librarians and the general public who are interested in the writing of history. Volume II covers entries from K to Z.