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Learn about the pre-Columbian, colonial and modern history of Colombia, from its indigenous cultures and Spanish annexation to its independence and armed conflict. Explore the geography, culture and heritage of this diverse and rich country.
- Overview
- Preconquest
- Conquest
- The audiencia
- Viceroyalty of New Granada
- Revolution and independence
- The republic to 1930
- Conservative-Liberal struggle, 1840–80
- The return of the Conservatives, 1880–1930
- Colombia, 1930–2000
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history of Colombia, a survey of the important events and people in the history of Colombia from the time of European settlement. Located in northwestern South America, Colombia has coastline that is bathed by the waters of the Caribbean Sea to the north and washed by the Pacific Ocean to the west. Named for Christopher Columbus, the “discoverer” o...
Even before the Spanish conquest, the western mountainous part of Colombia attracted the bulk of the population. The more advanced Indigenous cultures were found in this region, and the most favourable location for the growth of civilization was the high plateau in the Cordillera Oriental of the Colombian Andes. The present capital city of Bogotá is located near the southern terminus of the plateau, which extends northward to the mountains dividing it from the drainage of the Cesar River. There the Spanish found the major concentration of the Chibchan-speaking peoples. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Chibcha were in the process of consolidation by warfare and had not achieved firm union and political institutions.
Except for the invading Carib peoples in the deep mountain valleys, there was considerable similarity among the Chibcha, sub-Andean, and other cultures of Colombia. All were characterized by intensive agriculture, fairly dense populations living in villages, organized religion, class divisions, and matrilineal inheritance of political and religious offices. The sub-Andean culture in the Cordillera Central and the narrower portions of the Cauca valley generally lacked large villages because the terrain was unsuitable for them. The more advanced Chibcha made war for political ends, using large forces armed with darts and dart throwers.
European exploration of the Colombian coastline was accomplished by Rodrigo de Bastidas, who in 1500–01 sailed the Caribbean coast from Cape of La Vela to Point Manzanilla in Panama, and by Francisco Pizarro, who sailed the Pacific coast in 1525. The actual conquest of Colombia began in 1525 when Bastidas founded Santa Marta on the north coast. In ...
Establishment of the audiencia (an administrative and judicial tribunal) of Santafé de Bogotá in 1549 opened the colonial era. The conquerors had organized local governments in accordance with the terms of their contracts with the crown. The crown then rapidly repossessed the broad powers granted the conquerors and formed its own institutions to rule the empire. The governments of Popayán, Antioquia, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Ríohacha, the New Kingdom of Granada (Bogotá), and the llanos of Casanare and San Martín were made subject to the new audiencia. The president of the audiencia was the executive head of government, subject to the viceroy of Peru in administrative matters. The difficulties of travel, however, impeded communications and checked centralized control. The Indigenous population of the area declined through the introduction of European diseases and the economic demands made upon them.
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As elsewhere in the Spanish empire, the downward trend in population seems to have reversed itself at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century. Acculturation and intermarriage rapidly destroyed most of the special cultural traits of the remaining Indigenous people. Subordinate political jurisdictions developed strong regional characteristics as a result of isolation, which fostered intense local loyalties and rivalries. The economy was based on mining and agriculture, but a small yet important textile industry grew up in Socorro, north of Bogotá, by the mid-18th century. Slavery was introduced during the conquest and became common in the placer mining areas of the Chocó and western Antioquia and in the agricultural regions of the Cauca valley, the lower Magdalena valley, and the coastal lowlands. Indigenous persons were treated much like enslaved people; from the early 16th century they were subject to the encomienda system (requiring tribute in the form of gold or labour). By 1700 most of the privately held encomiendas had reverted to the crown, and they were rarely granted thereafter, but the Indigenous population continued to be abused.
The Viceroyalty of New Granada, which included present-day Colombia, Panama (after 1751), Venezuela, and Ecuador, was created in 1717–23 and reconstituted in 1740, opening a new era. In the next decades the crown introduced political and economic measures to reorganize and strengthen the empire by greater centralization of authority, improved administration and communication, and freer development and movement of trade within the empire. Population grew, trade increased, and prosperity touched the colonial subjects. There was a spurt of intellectual activity and the formation of a corps of intellectuals and professional men among Creoles (whites born in Spanish America), many in government positions. The small Creole officer corps came into being when Charles III, then king of Spain, authorized militia defense units in the colonies. A relatively large group of wealthy landowners and merchants constituted the economic community that supported these new groups. In 1781 peasants and artisans at Socorro originated the Comunero Rebellion in response to tax increases; although some Creoles helped lead the rebels to Bogotá, most hesitated to support the uprising or even helped to undermine it. Between 1785 and 1810 in New Granada the outlook of the Creole upper and middle groups changed from resistance against political and economic change to a quest for specific changes in imperial policies. In 1809 they moved toward the free enterprise system, the abolition of slavery, restrictions on government, and worldwide freedom of trade.
Educational reforms played an important role in the changing outlook of the Granadine Creoles. Archbishop Caballero y Góngora as viceroy (1782–88) made education one of his main interests. He modernized the program of studies in the schools, opened a school of mines, and initiated the botanical expedition under the able guidance of naturalist José Celestino Mutis. The new institute trained many of the major figures of the independence movement. The first newspaper and theatre were introduced during the 1790s. A new interest in writing developed, and intellectual gatherings for discussion were introduced. In 1808 the allegiance of the Granadines to the crown remained unquestioned except for a few individuals. The once warm loyalty of the Creole middle and upper classes, however, was cooling under the pressure of economic interests, scandals in the royal family, and persistent social tension between Creole and European Spaniards.
The French invasion of Spain in 1808 caused an outburst of loyalty to the king and country and excited grave concern for the church. Profound Granadine anxiety over the fate of the empire and conflicting courses of action attempted by colonial and peninsular subjects over control of government during the captivity of the Spanish king Ferdinand VII led to strife in New Granada and to declarations of independence. In 1810 the subordinated jurisdictions in New Granada threw out their Spanish officials, except in Santa Marta, Ríohacha, and what are now Panama and Ecuador. The uprising in Bogotá on July 20, 1810, is commemorated as Independence Day in Colombia, although these new governments swore allegiance to Ferdinand VII and did not begin to declare independence until 1811. Idealists and ambitious provincial leaders desired federation. Creole leaders sought to centralize authority over the new governments. A series of civil wars ensued, facilitating Spanish reconquest of the United Provinces of New Granada between 1814 and 1816. A remnant of republican forces fled to the llanos of Casanare, where they reorganized under Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general who remained a prominent figure in Granadine politics until his death in 1840.
Any remaining loyalty to the crown was alienated by the punitive arbitrary conduct of the European and partisan troops, whose actions gave validity to the attack on Spanish civilization that began late in 1810 and continued through the 19th century. The rebel forces in Casanare joined those of Simón Bolívar in the Orinoco basin of Venezuela. By 1819 arrangements for a regular government were completed, and a constitutional convention met at Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela) with delegates from Casanare and some Venezuelan provinces. In that same year Bolívar invaded Colombia and decisively defeated the Spanish forces on August 7 at Boyacá. There followed the decisive Battle of Carabobo, Venezuela, in 1821 and that of Pichincha, Ecuador, in 1822. Mopping-up operations were completed in 1823, while Bolívar led his forces on to Peru.
The Congress of Angostura laid the foundation for the formation of the Republic of Colombia (1819–30), which was generally known as Gran Colombia because it included what are now the separate countries of Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The republic was definitively organized by the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821. Prior to that time the government was highly military and hierarchically organized, with regional vice presidents exercising direct power while its president, Bolívar, was campaigning. Organized as a centralized representative government, the republic retained Bolívar as president and acting president Santander as vice president.
Gran Colombia had a brief, virile existence during the war. Subsequent civilian and military rivalry for public office and regional jealousies led in 1826 to a rebellion in Venezuela led by Gen. José Antonio Páez. Bolívar returned from Peru to restore unity but secured only the acknowledgment of his personal authority. As discontent spread, it became clear that no group loved the republic enough to fight for its existence. By 1829 Bolívar had divided the land into four jurisdictions under Venezuelan generals possessing civil and military authority. Meanwhile the convention of Ocaña had failed to reorganize the republic, and the brief dictatorship of Bolívar (1828–30) had no better success. Bolívar then convoked the Convention of 1830, which produced a constitution honoured only in New Granada (the name then referring only to Colombia, with the Isthmus of Panama). During this convention Bolívar resigned and left for the northern coast, where he died near Santa Marta on December 17, 1830. By that time Venezuela and Ecuador had seceded from Gran Colombia. New Granada, a country of 1.5 million inhabitants in 1835, was left on its own.
Santander, the vice president under Bolívar and then leader of the opposition to Bolívar’s imperial ambitions in 1828, held the presidency from 1832 until 1837 and was the dominant political figure of that era. The 1830s brought some prosperity to the new nation, but a civil war that broke out in 1840 ended nascent industrial development, disrupted...
Colombia’s modern political history began in the late 1840s with the delineation of the Liberal and Conservative parties. Gen. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, a Conservative, during his first term as president (1845–49) replaced the government monopoly on tobacco sales with a private monopoly and expanded international trade. These changes increased the production and export of tobacco but reduced the tax income of the national government.
In 1849 Gen. José Hilario López, of the radical faction of the Liberal Party, became president. It was his task to implement the reforms passed in 1850, which galvanized political sentiment and divided the country politically and economically for half a century. The guiding principle of the radical Liberals under General López was greater liberty for the people of Colombia. His government ended slavery, ended Indigenous people’s communal ownership of land, diverted tax resources from the central to local governments, and eliminated a number of taxes and monopolies held by the central government.
Rather than eliminating the institutional barriers to self-fulfillment by the people, however, the reforms of 1850 tended to eliminate the traditional proscriptions that had stood as safeguards against the exploitation of the poor by the rich. The reforms, despite the liberal rhetoric that accompanied them, legalized—indeed encouraged—a redistribution of landed property and tended to strengthen the position of the wealthy landowners, merchants, and professionals against the mass of poor Indigenous people, peasants, and artisans. Since there were only 25,000 enslaved people (in a country of 2,000,000 in 1851), the effects of manumission were small compared with those of the breakdown of the Indigenous communal system, which affected a third of the population. The Indigenous people were induced to give up their little plots of land and the small amount of independence they enjoyed. Within a few years the ownership of the land of Indigenous people was concentrated in a few hands; the Indigenous people had become tenants, their land used for grazing cattle.
While class conflict seethed under the surface in Colombian society, the struggle between members and groups within the elite was more open. Two issues in particular divided the upper class: first, whether a centralist or federalist political system would be the best arrangement for Colombia and, second, what role was appropriate for the Roman Catholic Church and particularly for its clerics in Colombian society. Adherents of federalism were strongest in the years between 1863 and 1880, during which time the country was called the United States of Colombia. Subsequent government publications were to refer to that period as the “Epoch of Civil Wars.” In 51 of the 240 months that passed in the 1860s and ’70s, there was some form of civil conflict taking place within the country. The Colombian army was so small that public order could not be maintained.
Both actions were reversed during the period of Regeneration (1880–95) under Rafael Núñez and the Conservatives who followed him. After further civil conflict in the 1880s, Núñez was able to promulgate a new constitution in 1886, to reestablish relations with the Vatican via the Concordat of 1887, and to promote some internal improvements and industrial development. But the political struggle between Liberals and Conservatives was far from over. Armed civil conflict reached its peak in the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1903). The estimates of the number of deaths in that struggle range from 60,000 to 130,000.
The devastating civil war was followed by the loss of Panama. The Colombian Congress refused an offer from the United States to build a canal across the isthmus, and in 1903 the Panamanians revolted against the government in Bogotá. They negotiated a treaty with the United States that created a Canal Zone 10 miles (16 km) wide under U.S. sovereignty in exchange for an agreement by the United States to build the canal and to provide a regular annual payment to Panama. Although the U.S. government later agreed to pay $25 million to Colombia, the episode embittered Colombian-U.S. relations for many years.
The new dependence on exports was not without its pitfalls. In the late 1920s coffee, petroleum, and bananas accounted for, respectively, 69, 17, and 6 percent of total Colombian exports, and all three dropped precipitously in value during the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s. This economic collapse had an immediate political result: the Con...
Learn about the preconquest, colonial, and modern history of Colombia, a South American country with diverse geography and culture. Explore its political, economic, and social challenges and achievements from the Spanish conquest to the present.
Il y a 2 jours · Learn about Colombia's diverse geography, culture, and history from Britannica, the authoritative source of information. Explore its Andean mountains, Caribbean coast, Pacific lowlands, and more.
L’ histoire de la Colombie commence il y a plus de 20 000 ans. Différentes civilisations amérindiennes se développent dès cette époque, dont la plus influente est celle du peuple Chibcha. Celui-ci domine le centre du pays lorsque Christophe Colomb « découvre » l'Amérique en 1492. Colombie au présent. Chronologie de la Colombie.
Learn how Colombia gained its independence from Spain in the 19th century, led by Simón Bolívar and his army of liberation. Explore the history of New Granada, the viceroyalty that included Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and the short-lived republic of Gran Colombia.
A comprehensive overview of the major events and changes in Colombia's history, from pre-Columbian times to the present. Learn about the cultures, conquests, colonization, independence, wars, and politics that shaped Colombia.
Il y a 2 jours · Learn about the history of Colombia, from its colonial past to its modern challenges. Explore its geography, culture, politics, and economy with Britannica.
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