The Division of the World

Selected as Art Book of the Year 2020 in The Art Newspaper by Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum Published here for the first time, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg's historically unique photographs show the Archivo General de Indias in Seville before its reorganisation.

Founded in 1785, this is the archive of roughly 300 years of Spanish colonial history in the Americas. It houses 8,000 charts and around 90 million documents-among them Christopher Columbus' logbook and the famous Treaty of Tordesillas which, mediated by the Pope and signed in 1494, entitled the Spanish and Portuguese kings to divide the world between them.

With this treaty as a starting point, the historian Martin Zimmermann takes the reader on a journey into the age of discovery and recounts stories of dangerous passages, encounters with the unknown, colonial brutality, the power of the cartographer - and of the insatiable lust to conquer the entire world.