Description
Book SynopsisPublished here for the fi rst time, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg's historically unique photographs show the Archivo General de Indias in Seville before its reorganisation. Founded in 1785, this is the archive of roughly 300 years of Spanish colonial history in the Americas. It houses 8,000 charts and around 90 million documents-among them Christopher Columbus' logbook and the famous Treaty of Tordesillas which, mediated by the Pope and signed in 1494, entitled the Spanish and Portuguese kings to divide the world between them. With this treaty as a starting point, the historian Martin Zimmermann takes the reader on a journey into the age of discovery and recounts stories of dangerous passages, encounters with the unknown, colonial brutality, the power of the cartographer - and of the insatiable lust to conquer the entire world.
Trade ReviewSelected as Art Book of the Year 2020 in The Art Newspaper by Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum.
Table of ContentsPrologue — Collected Time 9
I . An Archive as a Monument to Power
and Historical Retrospection 23
II . The “Overview Effect“ 43
III . Divisions of the World 53
IV . The Divided World of the Mediterranean and the Myth of Gold
Over the Seas 69
V . Celebrating the New World —
Expansion and the Exchange of Gifts 85
VI . Dividing the World in the Age of Discovery —
The Treaties of Tordesillas 95
VII . The Earth as a Whole? 107
VIII . The Splendour of Rule, Humanitarian Disasters
and Voices of Warning 121
Endnotes 143
