ABSTRACT
Eminent among the texts of discovery that established these ideas were Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana and Hans Staden’s Warhaftige Historia. Both these works therefore seek to establish certain kinds of borders between the Old and New World, and at the same time indicate possibilities for the negotiation of those borders as a means of colonial conquest. The idea of a border both excludes and includes, and these inclusionary and exclusionary processes were particularly significant and polyvalent in the context of colonial travel and conquest. In Europe more generally, this moment likewise put into question the established identities and frontiers of political and social incorporation deriving from the mediaeval world, destabilizing political allegiances and religious faiths. Outside the Central American and Andean regions, the image of conquest as a irresistible and quasi-inevitable dominance of the Europeans over the Indians cannot not be sustained.
