German Conquistadors in Venezuela
Author | : Giovanna Montenegro |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2022 |
Genre | : Electronic books |
ISBN | : 9780268203238 |
Download German Conquistadors in Venezuela Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download German Conquistadors In Venezuela PDF full book. Access full book title German Conquistadors In Venezuela.
Author | : Giovanna Montenegro |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2022 |
Genre | : Electronic books |
ISBN | : 9780268203238 |
Author | : Spencer R. Tyce |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : |
Release | : 2015 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : |
The invasion of the Americas was not simply a Spanish or a Portuguese endeavor. Rather, the event beginning in 1492 was actually an experience involving men and women from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, as well as Africa, the Mediterranean, and multiple parts of the Atlantic World. This dissertation examines the origins, activities, and failures of the Ulm/Augsburg-based Welser Company's enterprise in conquering and profiting from Venezuela between 1528 and 1556. Unlike other studies of conquistadors and explorers, this work places emphasis on the role of business and the activities of commercial entities during the early colonial period by exploring the corporate representatives and merchants turned explorers from outside Iberia during the first half of the sixteenth century. The Welser Company trading house began settling the northwest coast of Venezuela beginning in 1528 with not only German-speaking officials and merchants, but also with Spanish, French, English, Polish, and African soldiers-of-fortune. Primarily focused on expanding a commercial network that made them one of the most profitable trading firms in Europe, the Welser Company began exploratory operations into the Venezuelan interior. Despite high hopes and the backing of the financially powerful home office in Bavaria, these expeditions did not find the desired transportation networks, large-scale indigenous settlements, nor the gold and silver that would have made Venezuela a lucrative commercial hub in the Caribbean. Welser Company officials, unfamiliar with operating beyond the successful European methods of economic expansion, repeatedly committed the same mistakes in interacting with the indigenous people of Venezuela, disillusioned European settlers, and the Spanish administrators governing the New World. Indigenous groups operating alongside Europeans regularly suffered at the hands of their allies. Despite this seemingly one-sided diplomatic relationship, Venezuela's indigenous groups endangered European goals by acting in their own interests. Using ethnohistory and close readings of the European-created texts, this dissertation also explores indigenous movement, diplomatic savvy, and resistance against European actors and other indigenous groups. Understanding these failures, successes, and dynamics will help reveal the multifaceted Atlantic World in this often-ignored frontier in the sixteenth century.
Author | : Giovanna Montenegro |
Publisher | : University of Notre Dame Pess |
Total Pages | : 475 |
Release | : 2022-12-15 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0268203202 |
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.
Author | : Giovanna Montenegro |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : |
Release | : 2013 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : 9781303792366 |
My dissertation investigates the reality and ideology of colonial governance in the Province of Venezuela through sixteenth-century German, Spanish, and Italian maps and travel narratives. Through cartography, I trace the changing political and economic dimensions of the Welser company's desire to conquer the torrid zones. The Welsers, the Augsburg patrician and banking family, never sought to govern the Venezuelan province, but rather used a variety of strategies to increase profits, including a monopoly on the (legal) African and indigenous (illegal) slave trade. Chapter One analyzes the development of cartography in Germany and its relationship to developing mercantilism as a result of the Southern German/Venetian/Portuguese spice trade. In this chapter I pay particular attention to the circulation of Marco Polo's Milione and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville in the Southern German lands in the late fifteenth-century; German merchants such as Martin Behaim used Marco Polo's fabulous legends along with more recent discovery reports to try to gain funds to further partake in voyages of discovery. Likewise, a German translation of Columbus' letter of discovery adds marvelous elements to his description of cannibals found in the New World. Chapter Two links cartography to the Welsers' interest in genealogy, and to their desire for noble recognition from the Habsburgs. Chapter Three turns to actual conquest and analyzes Niclaus Federmann's Indianische Historia (1557). My interpretation of Federmann's preoccupations with gifts and written missives relies on Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift and on Jacques Lacan's observations on purloined letters. In Chapter Four I interpret Hispanic critical views of the German presence in South America. Beginning with the Friar Bartolome de Las Casas's pun of animales/ alemanes (animals/Germans), Spanish letters created a Black Legend that depicts the Germans as barbaric heretics and the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers as pious and industrious. The final chapter investigates the repercussions of this polemic in Venezuelan and German historiography and fiction: In Venezuela, the myth of an independent Spanish-American nation drives the anti-German effort to cast colonial history as purely Iberian. In nineteenth-century Germany the Venezuelan colonization venture fuels the desire for German colonization in Africa. In the Nationalist Socialist era conquistadors like Federmann symbolize the Aryan fight to conquer foreign lands. I ultimately investigate the links between German colonialism in the Renaissance period and Germany's late arrival unto the imperial era. The Welser episode, I suggest, causes Germany to reimagine itself as a colonial power in the Imperial era and through the Third Reich. In addition to opening a new venue of research, my interdisciplinary approach deciphers archival materials, illustrations that accompany New World chronicles and maps, travel narratives and legal documents. Thus, my dissertation is the first systematic study of the importance of this episode to both German and Venezuelan cultural history.
Author | : Ida Altman |
Publisher | : U of Nebraska Press |
Total Pages | : 327 |
Release | : 2019-06-01 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0803299575 |
The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century breaks new ground in articulating the early Spanish Caribbean as a distinct and diverse group of colonies loosely united under Spanish rule for roughly a century prior to the establishment of other European colonies. In the sixteenth century no part of the Americas was more diverse; international; or as closely tied to Spain, the islands of the Atlantic, western Africa, and the Spanish American mainland than the Caribbean. The Caribbean experienced rapid growth during this period, displayed considerable ethnic and religious diversity, developed extensive networks of exchange both within and beyond the region, and played an important role in the broader Spanish colonization of the Americas. Contributors address topics such as the role of religious orders, the development of transatlantic and regional commercial systems, insular and regional political dynamics in relation to imperial objectives, the formation of colonial society, and the effects on Caribbean colonial society of the importation and incorporation of large numbers of indigenous captives and enslaved Africans.
Author | : Erin Woodruff Stone |
Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
Total Pages | : 242 |
Release | : 2021-06-11 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0812253108 |
Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows how upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies.
Author | : A. Dana Weber |
Publisher | : Berghahn Books |
Total Pages | : 352 |
Release | : 2023-03-10 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1800738978 |
German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.
Author | : Jean Descola |
Publisher | : Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | : 274 |
Release | : 2023-03-08 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1000891429 |
The Conquistadors (1954) examines the discovery of the New World of South America and the spread from the Caribbean islands of adventurers in search of gold. Through sword and fire and torture they found gold, and in the process destroyed the great civilisations of Mexico and Peru.
Author | : Lucy Bollington |
Publisher | : University Press of Florida |
Total Pages | : 325 |
Release | : 2020-03-18 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1683401778 |
This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power. Contributors: Natalia Aguilar Vásquez | Emily Baker | Lucy Bollington | Liliana Chávez Díaz | Carlos Fonseca | Niall H.D. Geraghty | Edward King | Rebecca Kosick | Nicole Delia Legnani | Paul Merchant | Joanna Page | Joey Whitfield
Author | : Peter Hess |
Publisher | : Penn State Press |
Total Pages | : 134 |
Release | : 2021-11-18 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0271092246 |
Published in 1557, Nikolaus Federmann’s Jndianische Historia is a fascinating narrative describing the German military commander’s incursion into what is now Venezuela. Designed not only for classroom use but also for the use of scholars, this English translation is accompanied by a critical introduction that contextualizes Federmann’s firsthand account within the broader Spanish colonial system. Having gained the rights to colonize Venezuela from the Spanish Crown in 1528, the Welser merchant house of Augsburg, Germany, sent mercenaries, settlers, and miners to set up colonial structures. The venture never turned a profit, and operations ceased in 1546 after two Welser officials were murdered. Federmann’s text gives an account of his foray into the interior of Venezuela in 1530–31. It describes violent first contact with Indigenous peoples as well as Federmann’s communication strategies, how he managed to prevail in hostile terrain, and how he related to other agents of the conquests. It also documents his unwavering belief in the intrinsic preeminence of European Christians and, ultimately, in the righteousness of his mission. The only detailed record of this incursion, Federmann’s text adds a unique and important perspective to our understanding of first colonial contact on the Caribbean coast of South America. It provides insight into the first-contact dynamic, the techniques of subjugation and dominance, and the web of diverging interests among stakeholders. This volume will be a valuable resource for courses and for scholarship on conquest and colonialism in Latin America.