The lecture series offers a cross-period overview of the history of Latin America, from the arrival of Europeans in 1492 to the present day. It conceives the continent both as a hotbed of crises and as a historical laboratory in which social, cultural, political, and economic orders collided and interacted. Contemporary conflicts – such as the recent tensions surrounding Venezuela – are consistently embedded in their historical context.

Key historical sites of conflict and transformation were interbreeding and transculturation, as indigenous societies encountered European colonizers as well as African and Asian labor and forced migrants. Missionary enterprises and utopian settlement projects functioned as laboratories of religious disciplining, the exercise of power, and communal reorganization. Contact with the “New World” profoundly reshaped European regimes of knowledge. From this perspective, colonialism appears not only as a system of exploitation but also as a driver of early processes of globalization. Conflicts emerged between the distant rule of colonial empires and local forms of autonomous self-government within indigenous communities. This was reflected in Latin American historiography, oscillating between colonial narratives, national interpretive frameworks, and postcolonial critique.

For the twentieth century, the course analyzes military dictatorships, civil wars, and socialist social experiments, as well as Latin America as a macroeconomic laboratory. This includes the cybernetically inspired attempts to steer the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende, as well as the radical implementation of neoliberal reforms during the Pinochet dictatorship, guided by economists known as the Chicago Boys. These opposing models illustrate how the continent repeatedly served as an experimental field for global economic and political visions. By around 1900 at the latest, Latin America had come under the long-term influence of US imperialism.

From a Swiss perspective, the continent has often remained a blind spot despite its global entanglements. The lecture series seeks to counter this by making the complexity and dynamism of Latin American history visible and by conveying a historically grounded understanding of the present and its conflicts.