The conquerors and colonists of Latin America also had a major impact on the population of Latin America. The size of the indigenous populations has been studied in the modern era by historians, but Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas raised the alarm in the earliest days of Spanish settlement in the Caribbean in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. In what has come to be known as the Columbian exchange, diseases such as smallpox and measles decimated populations with no immunity. The Portuguese built their empire in Brazil, which fell in their sphere of influence owing to the Treaty of Tordesillas, by developing the land for sugar production since there was a lack of a large, complex society or mineral resources.ĭuring the European colonization of the western hemisphere, most of the native population died, mainly by disease. Spain concentrated on building its empire on the central and southern parts of the Americas allotted to it by the Treaty of Tordesillas, because of presence of large, settled societies like the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya and the Muisca, whose human and material resources it could exploit, and large concentrations of silver and gold. Subsequently, the major sea powers in Europe sent expeditions to the New World to build trade networks and colonies and to convert the native peoples to Christianity. See also: Spanish empire and Historiography of Colonial Spanish AmericaĬhristopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492. Nevertheless, the many and varied cultures that did exist in the pre-Columbian period had a strong and direct influence on the societies that emerged as a result of the conquest, and therefore, they cannot be overlooked. Since, the concept and definitions of Latin American are very modern, going back only to the nineteenth century, it is anachronistic to talk about "a history of Latin America" before the arrival of the Europeans. Concurrently, there has been a move to avoid this oversimplification by talking about " Latin America and the Caribbean," as in the United Nations geoscheme. In the mid-twentieth century, especially in the United States, there was a trend to occasionally classify all of the territory south of the United States as "Latin America," especially when the discussion focused on its contemporary political and economic relations to the rest of the world, rather than solely on its cultural aspects.
#1600x900 age of empires gold edition install
The actual term "Latin America" was coined in France under Napoleon III and played a role in his campaign to imply cultural kinship with France, transform France into a cultural and political leader of the area and install Maximilian as emperor of Mexico.
The idea that a part of the Americas has a cultural or racial affinity with all Romance cultures can be traced back to the 1830s, in particular in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas were inhabited by people of a " Latin race," and that it could, therefore, ally itself with " Latin Europe" in a struggle with " Teutonic Europe," " Anglo-Saxon America" and " Slavic Europe." The idea was later taken up by Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France.
Great Britain and the United States exercised significant influence in the post-independence era, resulting in a form of neo-colonialism, whereby a country's political sovereignty remained in place, but foreign powers exercised considerable power in the economic sphere. Political independence resulted in political and economic instability in Spanish America immediately after independence. Political independence from European monarchies did not result in the abolition of black slavery in the new sovereign nations. Brazil, which had become a monarchy separate from Portugal, became a republic in the late nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century nearly all of areas of Spanish America attained independence by armed struggle, with the exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Both the Spanish and the Portuguese brought African slaves to their colonies, as laborers, particularly in regions where indigenous populations who could be made to work were absent. The region came under control of the crowns of Spain and Portugal, which imposed both Roman Catholicism and their respective languages.
0 kommentar(er)
