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UB Humanities Series - Before Columbus: The Beginnings of European Colonial Expansion
Sometime between the years of 1326 and 1334, a French vessel was blown off course by a storm and sighted the Canary Islands, setting off an initial scramble to exploit the islands’ natural resources and their inhabitants, the Guanche, themselves. This scramble was cut short by the Black Death (1346-1353), but between 1402 and 1405, French aristocrat Jean de Bettencourt made several expeditions to the Canary Islands in an attempt to conquer them, establishing a settlement on Lanzarote under the overlordship of Castile.
In 1415, fifteen year old Duarte de Meneses was left in charge of the Portuguese garrison in Ceuta on the North African coast while his father, the garrison’s commander, went to Lisbon on official business. Duarte had been participating in skirmishes since the age of 13 and would later take part in the Portuguese Crown’s assault on another North African port, Ksar es-Seghir (in modern-day Morocco) before dying in 1464 as Afonso V of Portugal sought to conquer ever more North African territory. Portugal ceded Ceuta to Spain in 1668, and like the Canary Islands, it remains part of Spain to the present day.
These stories and more are told in early books belonging to the BECPL’s Rare Books collection. In my talk, I will discuss these earliest years of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism as they appear in early sources and in the context of later historical developments and contemporary scholarship."
-Professor Henry Berlin, SUNY University at Buffalo's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3039044-0
