German Conquistadors in Venezuela

Scholars of early colonial Latin America regularly present the era through an Iberian lens. Spanish conquistadores and settlers engaged in a generations-long, unfinished quest to dominate the American continents and to extract resources through both Indigenous and African labor. Despite scholars privileging non-Iberian voices since the 1960s, the Iberian Atlantic worldview is often the dominant force in exploring the relationships between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous Americans. Is it possible to explore these Atlantic exchanges through a different lens? In her new book, German Conquistadors in Venezuela, Giovanna Montenegro provides a clear, well-researched argument that examines the Welser Company's 1528–56 experiment in conquering and pacifying Venezuela. In a work that spans the inception of the experiment in the early sixteenth century to commemoration and debates about colonialism in the twenty-first, Montenegro argues that both the Welser Company and the Spanish crown planned and profited from a system of racial capitalism. Moreover, she argues that viewing the conquest through the lens of cultural memory can help explain the lingering effects of colonialism and national identity.Organized into three parts, the book flows both chronologically and thematically. Part 1 introduces the Welser Company, the systems of European credit and exchange that facilitated the expansion of Charles I's power as well as his imperial election, and the gradual inclusion of enslaved labor as a keystone of sixteenth-century merchant capitalism. Montenegro devotes a single chapter to the Venezuelan experiment, noting that in addition to a feeble relationship between the Welser Company and Spanish officials, there was a clear lack of stable leadership on the ground. Furthermore, the Welsers regularly engaged in maximizing their position in the Caribbean and Atlantic slave markets to the detriment of the colony's settlers and Indigenous residents. The Indigenous slave trade operating—often illegally—out of Venezuela was profitable, and neither the Welser Company nor Charles I's government seriously opposed it.The second part is a delightful analysis of Welser representations both of and by Welser officials and family members through narratives and maps. Nikolaus Federmann's Indianische Historia is one of the most important primary sources of the period. Written in the style of the well-documented probanza de méritos, the former Welser governor's account of his famous entrada demonstrated how the Welser Company established forced trading partnerships with Indigenous groups to encourage the exchange of Indigenous slaves. Montenegro's fourth chapter, “Blood and Soil,” is unique in exploring the mentalité of the Welser family by using maps and family trees as text. Montenegro argues that the Welsers, like many powerful commercial families of the era, worked to cement their place in European political and social circles. Maps, including those commissioned by Charles I, documenting the Welser colony and the company's Caribbean interests served as markers of memory and power for the family, even after the decline of their business empire. Genealogical illustrations further solidified the Welser name as coats of arms for both male and female marriage alliances appeared alongside maps of Welser Venezuela, highlighting the company's domination over both the American landscape and Holy Roman Empire society. The second part concludes with a detailed account of colonial chroniclers who often, inaccurately, portrayed the Welser experiment as guided by Lutheran heretics and policies of conquest and settlement that were anathema to the Spanish empire.The book's last section includes two chapters on how both the German and Venezuelan people incorporate the Welser period into their own histories and how memory and modern critiques of commemorating the colonial past are progressing in the twenty-first century. In the first half of the twentieth century, apologists of German colonialism in East Africa as well as the government of the Third Reich used the symbol of Welser Venezuela as a point of origin for German overseas expansion and nationalism. From the Venezuelan perspective, modern historiography and historical fiction regularly depict the colonial period, especially the Welser experiment, as a duality between barbarism and civilization.German Conquistadors in Venezuela proffers a well-written, multidisciplinary addition to transatlantic history by asking not how the Welser experiment failed but how this failure shaped and reshaped cultural and national identities for centuries. While scholars of the colonial period might be disappointed in the scope of this book, it will no doubt serve as a foundation for those interested in integrating nontraditional sources and theoretical approaches into their work, the importance of historiography and pop culture in shaping cultural memory, and the importance for scholars of colonialism to recognize the ongoing negotiation between the past and the present

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• Introduction

  Open Access•Annegret Oehme, Claire Taylor Jones•The German Quarterly•2023

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• E xtending C onquest H istory

  Open Access•Teresa Vergara, Francisco Quiroz Chueca et al.•The Americas A Quarterly Review…•2024

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