Hasil untuk "History America"

Alejandro Cañeque

Abstract This essay argues for a need to develop a new political history of colonial Spanish America in order to bring up to date the old institutional history of the Spanish empire. In recent decades, historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown much interest in the study of political and institutional history. Originally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasis on the institutional and legal aspects of the Spanish empire. But one effect of this historiographical development has been that, while our knowledge of the social history of colonial Spanish America has progressed in an impressive way, our knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made very little progress in the last 50 years. As a result, colonial historians have to rely on antiquated or inadequate notions regarding the political and institutional nature of Spanish colonialism. However, the new political history of colonial Spanish America should not focus on the study of the colonial state, but rather on the political culture of the Spanish empire.

Jon H. Roberts

Michael Derham

The history of Latin America has been dominated by ideas of order and progress. Unfortunately those ideas have not always been of regional origin. In the colonial era the conquest and conversion of the native peoples was seen as progress by the Europeans. The imposition of order was aided greatly by urbanization sometimes symbolically on the ruins of Indian cities such as at Cuzco and Mexico City. Cities became the point of cultural and economic articulation between the barbaric hinterland and the civilization of Europe. Freedom from the Spanish yoke gained in the Independence wars was similarly seen as progress, at least by the ultimately victorious creole ‘patriots’. It was here, however, that notions of national identity, modernization and economic success became intertwined to produce the conflicts which still inflame the region today. The paramount question has remained: whose order and concept of progress should be imposed?

The Age of Revolution is generally hailed as a time of radical ruptures in the social and political history of the Western world, although its “evolutionary” beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment are undeniable. While this dynamic period in history resulted in the radical depositions of monarchies and colonial administrations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it began with a philosophical debate between the British crown and its American colonists over the limits of freedom and popular sovereignty.

Thomas M. Truxes

Chapter 7 of The Overseas Trade of British America opens with a rescue plan for the East India Company that called for dumping vast quantities of tea in British North America and applying the infamous 1767 tax on tea. Resistance in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston forced importing agents to back down. But not in Boston. There, toe-to-toe confrontation between political activists and the Massachusetts governor precipitated the Boston Tea Party. Britain’s punitive response ignited armed rebellion. In the War of Independence that followed, success on the American side hinged on acquisition of military supplies from abroad. Some came directly from Europe, but most arrived through Dutch, French, Danish, and Spanish intermediaries in the West Indies. By far the greatest sufferers from the breakdown of colonial trade were the thousands of enslaved Africans in the British West Indies dependent on food from North America. The revolutionaries succeeded in establishing the independence of the United States, but its commerce was in shambles. The economy of the young republic, having lost its privileged connection to the British Empire, slid into a deep depression. Optimism prevailed, however, as the United States prepared to step onto the world stage.

Moses Rischin, Edwin Scott Gaustad