Süd America zur Übersicht der Entdeckung, Eroberung und Colonisation

Title

Süd America zur Übersicht der Entdeckung, Eroberung und Colonisation

Description

A Map of South America Containing Tierra-Firma, Guayana, New Granada, Amazonia, Brasil, Peru, Paraguay, Chaco, Tucuman, Chile and Patagonia.

ca. 1850

Artist

Perthes (1749-1816)

Johann Georg Justus Perthes ( 1749- 1816) was a German bookseller and publisher. Justus Perthes was the son of the Rudolstadt court physician Johann Justus Perthes. After training as a merchant, he obtained employment in the bookshop of Carl Wilhelm Ettinger in Gotha. Together with the latter and his later brother-in-law Friedrich Duerfeldt, he founded a company in 1778 to continue Ettinger's bookshop on his own. In September 1785, he founded Justus Perthes' Verlagsbuchhandlung, which from then on produced and distributed the Gothaische Genealogische Hofkalender, first published in 1763 and published by Ettinger, and its French edition, the Almanach de Gotha. Thanks to Perthes, the reference work soon known throughout Europe as "Der Gotha" was transformed from a calendar of the Enlightenment to an encyclopedia of the nobility with a diplomatic-statistical state handbook. In 1815, Perthes, together with the cartographers Adolf Stieler and Christian Gottlieb Reichard, planned the publication of an atlas, which was to be distinguished by "convenient format, the greatest possible accuracy, clarity and completeness, yet practical selection, uniformity of projection and scale, beautiful paper, good printing, careful illumination, and a reasonable price" and expand the publisher's program. In 1816, the year of Perthes' death, the first edition of Stieler's Hand-Atlas was published, which established the worldwide reputation of Justus Perthes' Geographical (Publishing) Institute Gotha - which only came into being after Perthes' death.

Historical Description

One of the earliest known South American civilizations was at Norte Chico, on the central Peruvian coast. Though a pre-ceramic culture, the monumental architecture of Norte Chico is contemporaneous with the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. In 1494, Portugal and Spain, the two great maritime European powers of that time, on the expectation of new lands being discovered in the west, signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, by which they agreed, with the support of the Pope, that all the land outside Europe should be an exclusive duopoly between the two countries. Beginning in the 1530s, the people and natural resources of South America were repeatedly exploited by foreign conquistadors, first from Spain and later from Portugal. These competing colonial nations claimed the land and resources as their own and divided it in colonies. The Spaniards were committed to convert their native subjects to Christianity and were quick to purge any native cultural practices that hindered this end; however, many initial attempts at this were only partially successful, as native groups simply blended Catholicism with their established beliefs and practices. Furthermore, the Spaniards brought their language to the degree they did with their religion, although the Roman Catholic Church's evangelization in Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní actually contributed to the continuous use of these native languages albeit only in the oral form. Guyana was first a Dutch, and then a British colony, though there was a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars when it was colonized by the French. The country was once partitioned into three parts, each being controlled by one of the colonial powers until the country was finally taken over fully by the British. The first South American country to abolish slavery was Chile in 1823, Uruguay in 1830, Bolivia in 1831, Colombia and Ecuador in 1851, Argentina in 1853, Peru and Venezuela in 1854, Paraguay in 1869, and in 1888 Brazil was the last South American nation and the last country in western world to abolish slavery.