The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies
The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies

Author: Captain Bernardo de Vargas Machuca

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-11-19

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0822389061

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Sometimes referred to as the first published manual of guerrilla warfare, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s Indian Militia and Description of the Indies is actually the first known manual of counterinsurgency, or anti-guerrilla warfare. Published in Madrid in 1599 by a Spanish-born soldier of fortune with long experience in the Americas, the book is a training manual for conquistadors. The Aztec and Inca Empires had long since fallen by 1599, but Vargas Machuca argued that many more Native American peoples remained to be conquered and converted to Roman Catholicism. What makes his often shrill and self-righteous treatise surprising is his consistent praise of indigenous resistance techniques and medicinal practices. Containing advice on curing rattlesnake bites with amethysts and making saltpeter for gunpowder from concentrated human urine, The Indian Militia is a manual in four parts, the first of which outlines the ideal qualities of the militia commander. Addressing the organization and outfitting of conquest expeditions, Book Two includes extended discussions of arms and medicine. Book Three covers the proper behavior of soldiers, providing advice on marching through peaceful and bellicose territories, crossing rivers, bivouacking in foul weather, and carrying out night raids and ambushes. Book Four deals with peacemaking, town-founding, and the proper treatment of conquered peoples. Appended to these four sections is a brief geographical description of all of Spanish America, with special emphasis on the indigenous peoples of New Granada (roughly modern-day Colombia), followed by a short guide to the southern coasts and heavens. This first English-language edition of The Indian Militia includes an extensive introduction, a posthumous report on Vargas Machuca’s military service, and a selection from his unpublished attack on the writings of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.

The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction
The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Matthew Restall

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 0199753172

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With startling speed, Spanish conquistadors invaded hundreds of Native American kingdoms, took over the mighty empires of the Aztecs and Incas, and initiated an unprecedented redistribution of the world's resources and balance of power. They changed the course of history, but the myth they established was even stranger than their real achievements. This Very Short Introduction deploys the latest scholarship to shatter and replace the traditional narrative

Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World
Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World

Author: Santa Arias

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2021-04-30

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0826503497

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From postcolonial, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspectives, this collection of original essays looks at the experience of Spain's empire in the Atlantic and the Pacific and its cultural production. Hispanic Issues Series Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief Hispanic Issues Online hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

Native and Spanish New Worlds
Native and Spanish New Worlds

Author: Clay Mathers

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0816530203

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Native and Spanish New Worlds brings together archaeological, ethnohistorical, and anthropological research from sixteenth-century contexts to illustrate interactions during the first century of Native–European contact in what is now the southern United States. The contributors examine the southwestern and southeastern United States and the connections between these regions and explain the global implications of entradas during this formative period in borderlands history.

The Netherlands Indies and the Great War, 1914-1918
The Netherlands Indies and the Great War, 1914-1918

Author: Kees van Dijk

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13: 9004260471

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Kees van Dijk examines how in 1917 the atmosphere of optimism in the Netherlands Indies changed to one of unrest and dissatisfaction, and how after World War I the situation stabilized to resemble pre-war political and economic circumstances.

Scorched Earth
Scorched Earth

Author: Emmanuel Kreike

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0691200122

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A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Colonizing Ourselves
Colonizing Ourselves

Author: José Angel Hernández

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 080619507X

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In the late nineteenth century, the Mexican government, seeking to fortify its northern borders and curb migration to the United States, set out to relocate “Mexico-Texano” families, or Tejanos, on Mexican land. In Colonizing Ourselves, José Angel Hernández explores these movements back to Mexico, also known as autocolonization, as distinct in the history of settler colonization. Unlike other settler colonial states that relied heavily on overseas settlers, especially from Europe and Asia, Mexico received less than 1 percent of these nineteenth-century immigrants. This reality, coupled with the growing migration of farmers and laborers northward toward the United States, led ultimately to passage of the 1883 Land and Colonization Law. This legislation offered incentives to any Mexican in the United States willing to resettle in the republic: Tejanos, as well as other Mexican expatriates abroad, were to be granted twice the amount of land for settlement that other immigrants received. The campaign worked: ethnic Mexicans from Texas and the Mexican interior, as well as Indigenous peoples from Mexico, established numerous colonies on the northern frontier. Leading one of the most notable back-to-Mexico movements was Luis Siliceo, a Texan who, with a subsidized newspaper, El Colono, and the backing of Porfirio Díaz’s administration, secured a contract to resettle Tejano families across several Mexican states. The story of this partnership, which Hernández traces from the 1890s through the turn of the century, provides insight into debates about settler colonization in Mexico. Viewed from various global, national, and regional perspectives, it helps to make sense of Mexico’s autocolonization policy and its redefinition of Indigenous and settler populations during the nineteenth century.

The Running Centaur
The Running Centaur

Author: Sinclair W. Bell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-21

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1000525368

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This book surveys the practice of horse racing from antiquity to the modern period, and in this way offers a selective global history. Unlike previous histories of horse racing, which generally make claims about the exclusiveness of modern sport and therefore diminish the importance of premodern physical contests, the contributors to this book approach racing as a deep history of diachronically comparable practices, discourses, and perceptions centered around the competitive staging of equine speed. In order to compare horse racing cultures from completely different epochs and regions, the authors respond to a series of core issues which serve as structural comparative parameters. These key issues include the spatial and architectural framework of races; their organization; victory prizes; symbolic representations of victories and victors; and the social range and identities of the participants. The evidence of these competitions is interpreted in its distinct historical contexts and with regard to specific cultural conditions that shaped the respective relationship between owners, riders, and horses on the global racetracks of pre-modernity and modernity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Colour of Paradise
Colour of Paradise

Author: Kris E. Lane

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-03-30

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 030016470X

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Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was—as it remains for all Muslims—the color of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide range of sources, Kris Lane traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Lane reveals the bloody conquest wars and forced labor regimes that accompanied their production. It is a story of trade, but also of transformations—how members of profoundly different societies at opposite ends of the globe assigned value to a few thousand pounds of imperfectly shiny green rocks.