Pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America

Abstract

The concept of 'Latin America' is a mid-nineteenth-century European invention, conjured up as a convenient means of distinguishing the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries from the Anglo-American world which, after the American Revolution, found its most powerful expression in the United States. However, if 'Latin America' was a novel term in the nineteenth-century political lexicon, the societies to which it referred were far from new. The independent Latin American states created in the early 1820s took political control of societies which, during three hundred years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, had been formed by interaction between peoples descended from the Amerindians who were the original peoples of the Americas, the Europeans who came to settle and the Africans who were forcibly carried across the Atlantic into slavery. None of these states was the same: they differed in geographical and demographic scale, ethnic composition and economic resources and potential. But they shared one fundamental feature: their societies, economies and cultures had all been profoundly marked by relations with the Iberian colonial powers in the centuries before independence. Indeed, the Latin America that came into being in the early nineteenth century was, in key respects, still redolent of an older world, with roots that went back to the European discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and beyond, into the past of the Amerindian societies which had developed over thousands of years before Columbus. Any appreciation of modern Latin American culturemusttake account of that historical experience.