German Conquistadors in Venezuela

Auteur

Giovanna Montenegro is an associate professor of comparative literature and director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies program at Binghamton University.

Texte du rabat

"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"--

Contenu

List of Figures

Introduction

PART I. The Welsers: A History of their Merchant and Racialized Capitalism

1. The Merchant Capitalism of the Welsers: Colonization, Commerce, Commodities, and Imperial Credit

2. The Welsers' Racialized Merchant Capitalism in Venezuela: Early Modern Slavery

PART II. Narrative and Cartographic Representations of the Welsers in Venezuela (16th-18th centuries)

3. Nikolaus Federmann's Indianische Historia: Failed Gifts and Translation as Strategies of the Welser Conquest of Venezuela

4. Blood and Soil:Welser Venezuela Between Cartography and Genealogy

5. "Foreign Governance:" The Welser Colony Remembered in Latin-American Colonial Literature (16th-18th Centuries)

PART III. Cultural Memory of the Welser Colony in Germany and Latin America (19th-21st Centuries)

6. The Ghost of Welser Venezuela in German Cultural Memory

7. The Venezuelan View of German Conquest: Post-Independence Literature and History

Conclusion

Epilogue: Restitution and Commemoration-Debates in Germany Today

Works Cited