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Essay on Buccaneers and Pirates
Latin America is a bigger, more diverse place than North America, with hundreds of racial, racial, and cultural features. The major split is between Spanish America and Portuguese America, and there are struggling local divergences within even these. Brazil itself was referred to in the plural, the Brazils, well into the 19th century, and Latin America as a place didn’t exist until rather of late. The Caribbean, with its transnational colonization, is the extreme case.
However there is a political reason in looking at the region as a group. The colonial period was controlled by Iberians, and therefore the history ties itself distinctly to the royal houses of Spain and Portugal. Ethnically there is less logic, but even here, the ways that Iberians, Indians and Africans combined, and recombined, to make a new society, have parallels across the region, and the exceptions tend to illuminate more than confuse.Overall, this is the story of how three peoples, Europeans, Americans and Africans, over three centuries, met, fought, murdered, intimidated, adapted, adopted, shared and married. A new World was created by the process of Latin America’s colonization.
Latin America: An Historical Overview
The term “Latin America” only surfaces in the mid-nineteenth century in the consequences of the wars for independence. In fact first used by the Colombian, José María Caicedo in 1856, it was promptly adopted by the French under Napoleon III to provide ideological cover for his imperial and colonial ambitions in the Americas. This clever however important shift from Spanish, Hispanic, or Ibero America to Latin America had powerful repercussions for defining a field and a region.
It moved the sense of the communal from neo-Spaniards to include not only neo-Portuguese, but also the neo-French.The wars for independence and the processes of nation-building in the nineteenth century helped create a sense of a collective past and present all over the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies......
