COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE SPANISH NEW WORLD, 1492-1550

The year “1492” is a powerful organizing concept in Western history, but the image it conjures obscures more than it reveals about our understanding of European-indigenous contact. This lecture begins nearly 800 years earlier with the Moors’ occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. In the ensuing “Reconquest” of the territory, Spain cultivated many of the institutions that later served as a template for organizing its vast New World territory. The focus on 1492 also clouds the fact that the Spanish “conquest” was always incomplete and control of the colonies often tenuous at best. This is the first of two stand-alone lectures on comparative European colonization.