Violence, Competition, and Exchange in the Early Colonial Era

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-74
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
New Knowledge

This chapter examines natural knowledge among natives and newcomers from the 1500s to the mid-1700s. It suggests that European-Indian encounters generated new knowledge, patronage relationships, and webs of exchange that affected intellectual life among both groups. The chapter includes sections on conquistadors in sixteenth-century Florida, patronage networks in Florida’s mission communities, cartography and the Indian slave trade, and the networks through which Europeans and Indians exchanged specimens and commodities. In short, Europeans and natives valued knowledge and the experts who produced it as sources of power and, from the 1500s through the 1700s, learned about their mutually new world during encounters involving violence, geopolitical competition, and exchange.

Remembering Indian Ocean Slavery through Film

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Abstract Due to assimilation, the diversity of the region, and the problems of identification, the presence of Asians with African ancestry in some parts of the Indian Ocean goes largely unnoticed. Whilst Ethiopians came to Sri Lanka voluntarily during the sixth century, the largest known Afro-Sri Lankan community’s history dates back to the island’s colonial era, which began in the sixteenth century. Oral traditions and archival records demonstrate that the Indian Ocean slave trade carried on even after abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Although their numbers have dwindled due to out-marriage and assimilation, this community’s presence is marked out through its strong cultural memories. This article highlights the significance of film as a medium for making Sri Lankans of African ancestry visible and giving them a space to reflect about their ancestors, cultural traditions and sociolinguistic transformations.

A Behind-the-Scenes Glimpse into the Princeps Edition of Colóquios dos simples (Goa, 1563)

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 232-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Nobre de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Technical Equipment ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Wide Dissemination

Considered by many to be the most learned Portuguese physician who lived in Goa during the sixteenth century, Garcia de Orta (c. 1500–1568) was the author of Colóquios dos Simples, e Drogas he cousas mediçinais da India [Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India] (Goa, 1563). Devoted entirely to the description of Asian natural resources, very little is known about how this treatise came into existence. Published at the edges of the Portuguese empire, and a hostage to technical, structural and human constraints, the princeps edition had a limited circulation. The diffusion around Europe of the novelties described in Colóquios dos Simples owed in part to the efforts of Clusius (1526–1609), one of the leading botanists of the time. This scholar promptly published Aromatum et Simplicium (Antwerp, 1567), a Latin epitome of Colóquios dos Simples. This complete reframing of Orta’s treatise guaranteed the wide dissemination of the new knowledge about Asian plants, fruits and drugs validated by the Portuguese physician on the periphery of the empire.
In this essay I analyse the background to the publication of the Portuguese treatise and demonstrate that, especially due to structural constraints, the princeps edition had a limited circulation. I show that the wide diffusion of the novelties about the natural resources of the Indies was dependent on the technical equipment, artistic skills and editorial criteria dictated and managed by European academics, artists and printers. I propose that the appropriation of local knowledge collected and validated in the Iberian Empires by imperial agents challenged European academics and typographers to create innovative treatises about the Indies’ natural resources that assured the widespread circulation of an entirely new natural knowledge.


Ambassadors and Administrators: The Role of Clerics in Early French Colonies in Guiana

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-277
Author(s):  
Gayle K. Brunelle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Fierce Competition

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

The Ethnoarchaeology of Salt Production at Lake Cuitzeo, Michoacán, Mexico

1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Average Yield ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Salt Production ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Strategic Resource

Salt has always been a strategic resource of primary importance. In Prehispanic times, salt was used mainly for human consumption, and after the Spanish conquest it became, in addition, an important commodity for silver processing and cattle raising. Salt production and trade in the Lake Cuitzeo basin are analyzed from the perspective of ethnography, archaeology, and ethnohistory. We know that salt from Araró, one of the towns where this research is focused, was paid as tribute in the early colonial era. Ethnohistorical sources concerning salt production in the Lake Cuitzeo basin are discussed, including information on the quantity of salt paid by each town in the first half of the sixteenth century. Contemporary salt-producing sites and methods are described, including the amount of brine and earth used, and the average yield of each finca, or salt-producing unit. Modern and ancient techniques and processes are compared, and found to be similar. The “archaeological visibility” of these activities is assessed, using examples from several areas of Mesoamerica to illustrate the archaeological features and artifacts (e. g., mounds, canals, and specialized pottery types) connected with salt making.

Evangelization of the “New World”: An Old World Perspective

1992 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casiano Floristán ◽  
Michael Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New World ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Old World ◽  
World Perspective

The theological and political context of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal must be taken into account if one wants to understand the motivations and methods of the first missionaries to the New World. Rather than an evangelization, therefore, we need to speak of a catechization of the indigenous peoples of America, even though this process, and the abuses that followed, came under constant critique throughout the colonial era.

Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco A. Scarano
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
High Degree

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, its island neighbour to the east, rank as two of the Western hemisphere's most racially mixed societies. Historical factors related in one way or another to slavery account for the high degree of racial admixture. Both countries experienced enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade intensely in the sixteenth century. This was followed by a long period of economic declension during which slave imports were low and the exploitation of slave labour fell into relative obsolescence. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, virtual economic autarchy in both colonies allowed for greater rates of miscegenation than in almost every other New World society significantly influenced by the institution of slavery.

The Civilian Contribution of the Spanish Royal Engineers, 1500–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Buisseret
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Santiago De Cuba ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

Rather neglected until recently, Spanish military engineers now have been studied in detail revealing that the Habsburg and Bourbon kings, from small beginnings in the sixteenth century, sustained an exceptionally large number of military engineers in the 17th and 18th centuries – over 600 in Europe and over 100 in the New World. Trained in mathematics, surveying, architecture and cartography they built a limited number of great forts, usually to defend strategic ports like Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Portobelo, and Cartagena de Indias. However, fortification was hardly necessary in the major capitals far from coastlines so their greatest, most enduring, achievements lay in cartography, road and water engineering, town planning and architecture.

scholarly journals Latin America in Global History: An Historiographic Overview

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
Great Divergence

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).

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