How the Spanish Empire Was Built

How the Spanish Empire Was Built PDF Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789148871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The untold story of the engineering behind the empire, showing how imperial Spain built upon existing infrastructure and hierarchies of the Inca, Aztec, and more, to further its growth. Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited, and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade, and widening the arc of Spanish influence. Bringing to life stories of engineers, prospectors, soldiers, and priests, the authors paint a vivid portrait of Spanish America in the age of conquest. This is a dazzling new history of the Spanish Empire, and a new understanding of empire itself, as a venture marked as much by collaboration as oppression.

How the Spanish Empire Was Built

How the Spanish Empire Was Built PDF Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789148871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Get Book Here

Book Description
The untold story of the engineering behind the empire, showing how imperial Spain built upon existing infrastructure and hierarchies of the Inca, Aztec, and more, to further its growth. Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited, and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade, and widening the arc of Spanish influence. Bringing to life stories of engineers, prospectors, soldiers, and priests, the authors paint a vivid portrait of Spanish America in the age of conquest. This is a dazzling new history of the Spanish Empire, and a new understanding of empire itself, as a venture marked as much by collaboration as oppression.

The Global Spanish Empire

The Global Spanish Empire PDF Author: Christine Beaule
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816541388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The Spanish Empire was a complex web of places and peoples. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this volume brings a broad range of regions into conversation. The contributors focus on nuanced, comparative exploration of the processes and practices of creating, maintaining, and transforming cultural place making within pluralistic Spanish colonial communities. The Global Spanish Empire argues that patterned variability is necessary in reconstructing Indigenous cultural persistence in colonial settings. The volume’s eleven case studies include regions often neglected in the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. The time span under investigation is extensive as well, transcending the entirety of the Spanish Empire, from early impacts in West Africa to Texas during the 1800s. The contributors examine the making of a social place within a social or physical landscape. They discuss the appearance of hybrid material culture, the incorporation of foreign goods into local material traditions, the continuation of local traditions, and archaeological evidence of opportunistic social climbing. In some cases, these changes in material culture are ways to maintain aspects of traditional culture rather than signifiers of new cultural practices. The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about Indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Contributors Stephen Acabado Grace Barretto-Tesoro James M. Bayman Christine D. Beaule Christopher R. DeCorse Boyd M. Dixon John G. Douglass William R. Fowler Martin Gibbs Corinne L. Hofman Hannah G. Hoover Stacie M. King Kevin Lane Laura Matthew Sandra Montón-Subías Natalia Moragas Segura Michelle M. Pigott Christopher B. Rodning David Roe Roberto Valcárcel Rojas Steve A. Tomka Jorge Ulloa Hung Juliet Wiersema

Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery

Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery PDF Author: Sylvia Sellers-García
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was built locally by people who existed at the peripheries of empire. Organized along routes and centralized into local nodes, peripheral knowledge accumulated in regional centers before moving on to the heart of the empire in Spain. The study takes the Kingdom of Guatemala as its departure point and examines the related aspects of documents and distance in three sections: part one looks at document genre, and how the creation of documents was shaped by distance; part two looks at the movement of documents and the workings of the mail system; part three looks at document storage and how archives played an essential part in the flow of paper.

Empires of the Atlantic World

Empires of the Atlantic World PDF Author: J. H. Elliott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

U.S. History

U.S. History PDF Author: P. Scott Corbett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1886

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Book Description
U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana

Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana PDF Author: Evelyn Jennings
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174653
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana examines the political economy surrounding the use of enslaved laborers in the capital of Spanish imperial Cuba from 1762 to 1835. In this first book-length exploration of state slavery on the island, Evelyn P. Jennings demonstrates that the Spanish state’s policies and practices in the ownership and employment of enslaved workers after 1762 served as a bridge from an economy based on imperial service to a rapidly expanding plantation economy in the nineteenth century. The Spanish state had owned and exploited enslaved workers in Cuba since the early 1500s. After the humiliating yearlong British occupation of Havana beginning in 1762, however, the Spanish Crown redoubled its efforts to purchase and maintain thousands of royal slaves to prepare Havana for what officials believed would be the imminent renewal of war with England. Jennings shows that the composition of workforces assigned to public projects depended on the availability of enslaved workers in various interconnected labor markets within Cuba, within the Spanish empire, and in the Atlantic world. Moreover, the site of enslavement, the work required, and the importance of that work according to imperial priorities influenced the treatment and relative autonomy of those laborers as well as the likelihood they would achieve freedom. As plantation production for export purposes emerged as the most dynamic sector of Cuba’s economy by 1810, the Atlantic networks used to obtain enslaved workers showed increasing strain. British abolitionism exerted additional pressure on the slave trade. To offset the loss of access to enslaved laborers, colonial officials expanded the state’s authority to sentence deserters, vagrants, and fugitives, both enslaved and free, to labor in public works such as civil construction, road building, and the creation of Havana’s defensive forts. State efforts in this area demonstrate the deep roots of state enslavement and forced labor in nineteenth-century Spanish colonialism and in capitalist development in the Atlantic world. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana places the processes of building and sustaining the Spanish empire in the imperial hub of Havana in a comparative perspective with other sites of empire building in the Atlantic world. Furthermore, it considers the human costs of reproducing the Spanish empire in a major Caribbean port, the state’s role in shaping the institution of slavery, and the experiences of enslaved and other coerced laborers both before and after the beginning of Cuba’s sugar boom in the early nineteenth century.

Invading Guatemala

Invading Guatemala PDF Author: Matthew Restall
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271027584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts

Aztecs

Aztecs PDF Author: Inga Clendinnen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110769356X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Recreates the culture of the city of Tenochtitlan in its last unthreatened years before it fell to the Spaniards.

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies PDF Author: Bartolomé de las Casas
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
Witness the chilling chronicle of colonial atrocities and the mistreatment of indigenous peoples in 'A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies'. Written by the compassionate Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542, this harrowing account exposes the heinous crimes committed by the Spanish in the Americas. Addressed to Prince Philip II of Spain, Las Casas' heartfelt plea for justice sheds light on the fear of divine punishment and the salvation of Native souls. From the burning of innocent people to the relentless exploitation of labor, the author unveils a brutal reality that spans across Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba.

The Conquest of History

The Conquest of History PDF Author: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
As Spain rebuilt its colonial regime in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish American revolutions, it turned to history to justify continued dominance. The metropolitan vision of history, however, always met with opposition in the colonies.The Conquest of History examines how historians, officials, and civic groups in Spain and its colonies forged national histories out of the ruins and relics of the imperial past. By exploring controversies over the veracity of the Black Legend, the location of Christopher Columbus's mortal remains, and the survival of indigenous cultures, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's richly documented study shows how history became implicated in the struggles over empire. It also considers how these approaches to the past, whether intended to defend or to criticize colonial rule, called into being new postcolonial histories of empire and of nations.