ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how the so-called ‘first globalization’, which was mainly governed by the logic of material gain flowing from the Indies to the metropole, has mistakenly been associated with various Eurocentrist axioms about modernity. However, cosmopolitanism and the circulation of ideas and knowledge between the Old and New Worlds, which began in different spaces and was directed from different countries, was far from homogeneous. The expansion generated a variety of colonial situations, the outcome of both local reactions and the colonizers’ different expansion models. Likewise, this social mobility from the ‘centre’ to the ‘peripheries’ did not impede the ability of local groups to affect global decision-making. European globalization was preceded by an earlier process: the strengthening of regional and local habits. Colonialism, of course, is an ambivalent, fluid process that involves appropriation, cultural borrowing and effective resistance by the colonized. In this respect, the cultural patterns of indigenous peoples did not only survive the arrival of the Europeans, but they integrated, adapted and reinterpreted their values and traditions to the new Christian codes and symbols as a way of preserving them in a type of cultural syncretism.
