Early Contact: Lecture Slides 2024-35

[Archive, 2020-21:

Lecture Part 1

Lecture Part 2

PPT for CC seminar (Thursday)

Questions

• What factors shaped the nature of early colonisation in the Caribbean and Brazil?
• How did Columbus make sense of the new world?
• What was Las Casas' critique of Spanish behaviour in the Caribbean? What was its effect in Spain?
• What kind of society grew up in early colonial Brazil? What forms of labour did the Portuguese settlers prefer? What is a "go-between" and why has it become an important term?
• Do you see more similarities or more differences between the cases of the Caribbean and Brazil?
• The latest research about Christopher Colombus might be interesting to talk about in seminars this week: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/13/christopher-columbus-was-spanish-and-jewish-documentary-revealsLink opens in a new window

Required Seminar Reading

• Alida C. Metcalf, “Domingos Fernandes Nobre, ‘Tomacauna’, A Go-Between in Sixteenth-Century Brazil,” The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America, ed. Kenneth Andrien (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2002), pp. 51-63 (Library Scans)
• ONE of the following 2 primary sources:

1: Columbus' Journal of the First Voyage, 1492-3:

• Columbus, Christopher, Journal of the First Voyage, 1492-3 (Read from 11 October to the end)
  This text is available in many different formats. See for example:

  Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Geoffrey Symcox and Blair Sullivan, Palgrave (2005).
  Columbus, Christopher, Journal of the First Voyage, 1492-3, American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement, (The American Journeys Website is also useful for other accounts and primary source material including, for example, Bartolomé de las Casas. You can search the texts with specific search terms.)
  ‘Medieval Sourcebook: Christopher Columbus, Extracts from Journal’,

• If you want to look at the original manuscript you can see it on Bibliotheca Augustana here:

  Epistola de insulis nuper inventis

OR, 2: Bartolome de las Casas, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552 [this is a very famous scathing critique of Spanish behaviour in the Caribbean by a Dominican missionary who witnessed it.]

Additional Reading

• Abulafia, David, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT, 2008).
• Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1977).
• Seed, Patricia, "Are These Not Also Men?': The Indians' Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilisation."Journal of Latin American Studies. Vol. 25 No.3, (1993) pp. 629-652.

On the Caribbean:

• Boucher, Philip P., Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, 1992).
• Boucher, Philip P., ‘First Impressions: Europeans and Island Caribs in the Pre-Colonial Era, 1492-1623’ in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (London, 2000), pp. 100-116.
• Foote, Nicola (ed.), The Caribbean History Reader (London: Routledge, 2013), pp 1-16.
• Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, ‘The Columbian Moment’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 83-95.
• Guitar, Lynne A., ‘Negotiations of Conquest’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 115-129.
• Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean (London, 1986), chapter 1.
• Sued-Badillo, Jalil, ‘From Tainos to Africans in the Caribbean’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 97-114.
• Primary sources: Laws of Burgos (1512-1513): royal ordinances for the good government and treatment of the Indians Translated by Peter Bakewell, The New Laws of the Indies, 1542, (Fordham History Sourcebook) 

On Brazil:

• C R Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson, 1969 (chapters on early colonisation of Brazil)
• Schwartz, Stuart B, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
• Burkholder, Mark, and Lyman Johnson, Colonial Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter 1, “Iberia and America Before the Conquest,” pp 1-43
• Primary sources: “Origins, Conquest and Colonial Rule” (chapter 1), The Brazil Reader, eds. Robert Levine and John Crocitti (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 16-62