Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Hispanic Colonial Experience in the New World

The purpose of this research is to examine the Hispanic colonial experience in the New World. The plan of the research will be to set forth the basis on which Spain's project of exploration and colonization can be seen as a defining moment of the social history of the entire world, and then to discuss ways in which the Spanish response to found conditions, including indigenous peoples, in the Americas reflected European attitudes of the Renaissance and appears to have influenced subsequent encounters between powerful and relatively less powerful peoples from that period onward.

Any understanding of the Spanish imperial project in the New World must be placed in the context of Spain's position in European Renaissance history. As much as military strength and stratagem, Spain exported the Spanish mind to the New World at the time of the conquest, and it was this mind that appears to have determined the shape that the conquest assumed. It cannot be stressed too strongly that 1492 was not only the year that Columbus reached America but also the year that the Moors (and Jews) were formally expelled from Spain. The background of the expulsion was the Spanish Inquisition, a form of what might be called religious cleansing, meant to guarantee the moral authority of the Roman Church in general and Spain in particular and meant to guarantee the benefits of religious hegemony.

The Crown of Aragon, the family into which Ferdinand was born, had long been the objective of a number of ambitious European and Mediterranean rulers, not least the Kingdom of Castile (Isabella's family). But Aragon was no stranger to intrigue. In 1282 there occurred the famous Sicilian Vespers, the name given to a riot in which Sicilians killed some 2,000 French residents, officials, and military men in Palermo and other cities, at the urging of Peter III of Aragon at the time (Runciman 201-13). Whether Aragon plotted the Sicilian Vespers or not, Aragon increasingly ...

Page 1 of 15 Next >

More on Hispanic Colonial Experience in the New World...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Hispanic Colonial Experience in the New World. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 22:02, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712037.html