During Porfirio Diaz’ rule, power in Mexico was pre-eminent among the elite – landowners, bankers, captains of industry etc. Urban and agricultural workers, the growing middle classes and…
Category: South American History
The liberators of Spanish South America
The end of the great Spanish Empire was to a great extent aided by two officers, one Spanish himself, the other a Creole from Venezuela. Both achieved huge…
Commerce in History: the slave trade
Thinking people still get hot under the collar when the subject of the trade in slaves looms. But then, more nonsense is spoken about the slave trade by…
Pope Pius the Twelfth
Eugenio Pacelli was born in 1876, and was elected Pope in 1939. He came from a familyprominent for its loyal service to the Vatican. He was ordained priest…
The Merchant Adventurers
This early fifteenth century name was coined to cover English merchants engaged in the export/import trade. The first of these was made official in 1407. After this, internationally-based…
The first Empire upon which the sun never set
Four hundred years before the British Empire never enjoyed the setting sun, the Spanish Empire rose, flourished, dwindled and vanished. From the late fifteenth century, Spain, a fraction…
The Virginius incident
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century piracy and slavery/the slave trade were almost extinguished, partly because governments were not inclined, as they had before, to…
Two bad men
Today we will concentrate on two bad men whose names constantly crop up in history. One, the first, was a Nazi leader in Germany, the second was…
Two Hawkins, father & son, both ‘pirates’
Sir John and Sir Richard Hawkins or Hawkyns would have preferred to be called seamen, or navigators, or simply sailors. That is how British history books describe them….
The Pizarro brothers and Perú
Francisco Pizarro was born in 1475 in Extremadura in western Spain, when that country was even more powerful than France. He became a conquistador and an important explorer….