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1. IntroductionThe term “colonial rivalry” denotes the competitive struggle for hegemony in Europe and other regions of the world, conducted by the European states, following their “discovery” of America (America, Discovery of) and in the course of the European expansion that followed it (Expansionism) by means of the acquisition of colonies and the construction of colonial empires. It is a phenomenon specifically of European early modern history: although non-European states such as China (see C…

When Martin Luther, making his translation of the New Testament (1522), rendered the “ magi ab oriente” (“magi from the Orient”) in the Nativity story (Mt 2,1) as “Weise vom Morgenland” (“wise men from the morning-land”), he cannot have known that he was coining a term that would continue to be used in Germany for the next five hundred years. In geographical terms, “Morgenland” thus originally denoted the regions to the east of the biblical Holy Land, but it soon came to refer, like “Orient” in other European languages, to whatever lay in the direction of the “rising sun” (Latin:  oriens) f…

Tordesillas, a small Spanish town on the Duero in the Castilian Meseta, gave its name in 1494 to one of the most important early modern treaties in the context of European imperialist expansionism and the emergence of the Atlantic world.In 1493, immediately after Christopher Columbus returned from his first voyage, on which he believed he had reached the Indies beyond the Atlantic Ocean (America, discovery of), the Spanish monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had taken steps to exclude their rival Portugal and ot…

1. Concept Decolonization in general denotes the withdrawal of colonial powers from territories in which they formerly ruled over an indigenous population. From the perspective of the colonial powers, this is a process of dissolution in the sense of a setting free; from that of the colonized peoples, it is a process of release from the colonal power with the aim of liberation and state sovereignty. Decolonization thus also refers to the end of the European colonial empires that had beco…

1. Concept and meaningAs a manifestation of the world system, “world empire” is a historiographical organizational concept of an entity that (1) encompasses much of the known world and an ethnically and culturally diverse body of subjects, as characteristic of an empire (Reich), that (2) forms a territorial domain based on political power, the real (often military) threat of force, and cultural hegemony, with concomitant self-image and perception of supremacy, that (3) influences the regions…

1. Geographical rootsThe Spanish and Portuguese used the term “Indio” to refer to the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. Columbus’s expedition was in search of India, and since he believed that Watling Island, which he reached on October 12, 1492, was actually an offshore island of India in Asia, he called the population encountered there “Indios.” With his famous letter of February 1493 [2. 140]; [9], the term took hold in the Spanish kingdoms. The Spanish continued to refer to the newly discovered regions (America, Discovery of) in general as  Las Indias (“The Indias”)…

1. DefinitionThe term Columbian Exchange describes the process of interaction between Europe and the Americas that took place following the voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus (1492), the extent of which went unnoticed by contemporaries. In 1972, the American historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. showed that Columbus' expeditions to the New World had just as profound an impact in biological as in cultural respects, if not greater [2]; cf. [1].Since then, the expression Columbian Exchange has been used to describe the enormous and diverse exchange between…

1. IntroductionThe Latin American Wars of Independence (1808/10-1826/30) belong to the context of the revolutions and liberation movements of the 18th and 19th centuries [17]. They grew out of an interaction between the growing alienation of members of colonial elites born in the Americas - American Spanish and American Portuguese (the so-called Creoles) - from their ancestral European countries, the development of a patriotism focused on the local region in the colonies rather than on the distant “homeland,” and …

1. Introduction The voyages of discovery, sponsored by the Spanish kings from the late 15th century, which took seafarers to the parts of the world that came to be named America or the New World were originally not intended to discover new countries. The original aim was to win the race to India against the Portuguese, who had chosen the southward route around Africa. The Spanish plan was to take the supposedly shorter direct path across the Atlantic and then to find a navigable passage to India a…

1. Definition The term Haitian Revolution refers to the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the events that followed it (Slavery). After the American Revolution of 1776, it was the second such uprising in the New World, and its outcome, in 1804, was the foundation of the first independent modern state in Latin America [6]. The constitution of this state, called Haiti, by former slaves had a fateful impact on the direction of the Latin American wars of independence.Hans-Joachim König 2. Racial conflicts Ever since the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), whic…

1. ConceptThe “lines of amity,” in the context of European overseas expansion and the emergence of the Atlantic world, were demarcation lines between Europe and overseas. In 1634, Richelieu wrote in a memorandum of “lines of the amities and alliances” (French  lignes des amitiés et des alliances) [4. 187]. A better name, however, would have been “lines of enmity,” as they dated from the 16th and 17th centuries when far-reaching legal disputes over the status of overseas regions were played out by force or the threat of force. English te…

1. ConceptThe Spanish term conquista in general means “conquest,” and in particular, in the context of early modern history (specifically of European expansionism), the violent conquest of vast territories and empires in the Americas by the Spaniards, the so-called Conquistadors, who followed immediately in the wake of the discovery of America (America, Discovery of) in 1492, to some extent even overlapping with it. Conquista in general use (especially outside Spain) is associated with the thirst fo…

1. Definition and backgroundThe Requerimiento (Spanish “demand,” “admonition”) was a document composed by the Spanish crown jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios in 1513 on the legal status of Spanish rule in America.The violent Conquista of the newly discovered territories in the New World by the Spanish conquistadors and the brutal treatment of the Indigenous population (the so-called Indios) by the first colonists on the one hand and the Spanish claim to be the bearers of civilization (Civilization process) on the other tri…

1. Definition The term Bourbon reforms denotes the reform undertaken in Spain by which the Bourbon dynasty in the 18th century reshaped the structures it had inherited from its Habsburg predecessor in the fields of trade, economy, political, government, and the military.Hans-Joachim König 2. Historical context After the decline of the Spanish Empire under the last Habsburg king, Charles II (d. 1700), a process that reached its nadir with the Spanish War of Succession (1701-1713/14), the new Bourbon Dynasty began, hesitantly at first under …

1. IntroductionFrom the mid-16th century, the term “New World” denoted the Americas. This was not, however, the case from the outset, as the Portuguese and Spanish discovered new lands in the 15th century as they expanded into the Atlantic world, or when Columbus in 1492 added something completely new to European world perception by discovering America (America, discovery of).Even in Greco-Roman antiquity, authors like Strabo and Pomponius Mela used the expression “other/new world” (Greek  álle oikouméne; Latin  mundus/ orbis novus) for all newly-discovered regions of t…

1. BasicsFrom the 2nd century on, numerous legends grew up around Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose life is only briefly sketched in the NT. Especially after the divine sonship of Jesus Christ was defined dogmatically in the 4th and 5th centuries, she was venerated privately and liturgically. Particularly in the Middle Ages, a growing number of Marian feasts were established and distributed throughout the church year, while churches and pilgrimage sites (Pilgrimage, local) were dedicated to the Mother of God (see 2.2. below).In the Middle Ages, she was also seen as an exempl…

1. General surveyIn the early modern period, resistance to government (Sovereign power) should be understood as a corrective to the exercise of familial, economic, ecclesiastical, and political authority. In a way, it was a substitute for later correctives like the control of government by Parliament and the control of institutions, churches, and enterprises by their own internal organs, some of which came into being through democratic processes, while others functioned as authorities. There were …

1. Europeanization of the world?Until long into the 20th century, western historians and scholars investigating European expansionism and the creation of colonial empires outside Europe spoke as a matter of course and without hesitation of the “Europeanization of the world.” Historians and cultural scientists today use this term with considerably more refinement or refrain from using it altogether – not only because “Europeanization” is no longer a fact since the completion of decolonization …

1. Atlantic expansion and its impact on the European states 1.1. Discovery of America, prior history and consequencesThe voyage of discovery of Christopher Columbus, who on 12 October 1492, while searching for a westerly route across the “Ocean Sea” to India, became the first European to sight islands on the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean, heralded a new phase of history, both for Europe and for the continent hitherto unknown to Europeans: a phase of global interaction. From now on, the history of the two si…

1. Introduction and concept The history of the early modern period is the history of the first modern global society. It is still commonplace to interpret it as a period of untrammeled European expansionism. This, however, is uncritically to project the ascendancy of the highly industrialized states of Europe and the United States back into earlier periods, ignoring the fact that this ascendancy only came about in the late 19th century (Industrialization). Through haste and generalization, the slave…