This fascinating study traces sixteenth-century German colonialism in Venezuela through the lens of racialized capitalism and the subsequent memorialization of the period through to the twentieth century. Giovanna Montenegro investigates one of the strangest and often-ignored episodes in the conquest and colonization of the Americas--the governance of the Province of Venezuela by the Welsers, a German banking family from Augsburg, in the sixteenth century. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book chronicles the Welsers' business expansion beyond banking to colonization and the slave trade in the Spanish Indies and the eventual failure of the colony. Montenegro follows the money that financed the Habsburg empire, tackling a multifaceted, multilingual corpus of primary documents. She examines numerous legal documents, from contracts granting colonization and slave trade rights (capitulaciones, asientos) to complex financial transactions (interests, exchange rates). She also analyzes maps, literary texts, and various chronicles and poems of the period. The book examines a history of violence perpetrated upon enslaved Indigenous and African people, but it is also the story of how different generations across the Atlantic, up to Nazi Germany in the twentieth century, have remembered and recalled this Welser period of governance in Venezuela to serve other social and political purposes. Montenegro positions her research in relation to current critical discussion on inequality, slavery, White supremacy, and neoconservative nationalist movements in contemporary Latin America and Germany. German Conquistadors in Venezuela is a stimulating read. The book will appeal to Latin Americanists, Germanists, early modernists, and scholars and students interested in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and memory studies.
Giovanna Montenegro is an associate professor of comparative literature and director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies program at Binghamton University.
List of Figures Introduction PART I. The Welsers: A History of their Merchant and Racialized Capitalism 1. The Merchant Capitalism of the Welsers: Colonization, Commerce, Commodities, and Imperial Credit 2. The Welsers' Racialized Merchant Capitalism in Venezuela: Early Modern Slavery PART II. Narrative and Cartographic Representations of the Welsers in Venezuela (16th-18th centuries) 3. Nikolaus Federmann's Indianische Historia: Failed Gifts and Translation as Strategies of the Welser Conquest of Venezuela 4. Blood and Soil:Welser Venezuela Between Cartography and Genealogy 5. "Foreign Governance:" The Welser Colony Remembered in Latin-American Colonial Literature (16th-18th Centuries) PART III. Cultural Memory of the Welser Colony in Germany and Latin America (19th-21st Centuries) 6. The Ghost of Welser Venezuela in German Cultural Memory 7. The Venezuelan View of German Conquest: Post-Independence Literature and History Conclusion Epilogue: Restitution and Commemoration-Debates in Germany Today Works Cited
"A well-written, multidisciplinary addition to transatlantic history ... asking not how the Welser experiment failed but how this failure shaped and reshaped cultural and national identities for centuries." -Hispanic American Historical Review "German Conquistadors in Venezuela offers a new and exciting comparative approach and a long chronological sweep, which permits a nuanced consideration of how the story of the Welsers resonates in historical narratives on both sides of the Atlantic." -Karen Stolley, author of Domesticating Empire "A fine portrayal of the Welser era in Venezuela and a convincing interpretation of its many uses in very different contexts." -Colonial Latin American Review "Giovanna Montenegro's book, divided into three parts and seven chapters, is a timely and welcome contribution ot the early history of German involvement in colonialism and the reception of this effort in later centuries, both in Spanish-language and German contexts." -Sixteenth Century Journal "German Conquistadors in Venezuela is the only book...that takes a cultural studies approach to conquest. Montenegro's work is a reminder of the varying levels of historical memory that one needs to sift through to interpret the European invasion of the Americas. -Latin American Research Review
