Today’s entry will be the first of a six part series of posts in which I will identify and explain the causes that sparked the War of Venezuela’s Independence.

The intent is for each part to be a trigger for the following one, culminating with the actual beginning of the War of Independence. The six part series will be divided in three indirect causes and three direct causes. On this initial entry I will begin with the first of the three indirect causes.

The Invention of the Press.

Many inventions have substantially affected and changed humanity ever since we have been populating the Earth. Few however, have had the impact of the Printing Press.

I’ve always believed that it is important to study history keeping the perspective of the time in which the events unfolded are told, in order to understand the magnitude and especially the long term impact of the event in humanity. When talking about the invention of the Printed Press, we have to imagine Europe being a continent of monarchies, coming out of a feudal system, with a very low percentage of the population being educated and able to read or write. Knowledge was a privilege and ideas were floating in the air, nowhere to be kept on record and distributed to the people. All of this changed en 1440 with the introduction of a fast and efficient method to reproduce written content.

The invention of the Printed Press therefore implied a larger, faster, quicker and better distribution of knowledge throughout Europe. New authors came along, new perspectives, new points of view and overall, it opened the pathway for mass communication and for thinkers to actually spread their different schools of thought to the population. It was a very big deal, one of the greatest moments in the history of mankind and the originator of what would happen next, which is what I label as the second indirect cause of Venezuela’s War of Independence, which we will take a look at in my following entry.