Exemplary Violence

Explores Colombia's violent colonial history by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela), each of which reveals the colonizing elite's reliance on a constant threat of violence for sustaining colonial order.

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Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.