First published in 1964, A History of Venezuela is based on Dr Guillermo Morón’s Historia de Venezuela originally published in Caracas, but it has several distinctive features. The textbook form of the original has been abandoned for a narrative presentation, various sections of the book have been abridged without, however, losing the development of the author’s thesis and two completely new chapters have been specially written for the book. The first of these deals with events and politics in the stormy period since the death of the tyrant Gómez in 1936, while the second is an analysis of the 1960’s economic scene in Venezuela and has been written by Dr Manuel Rodríguez Mena of the Universidad Central in Caracas.

The first six chapters develop the history of Venezuela and her culture from the purely Indian times, through the Spanish conquest and colonisation, through the revolution against the Spanish rule and the subsequent troubled national period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.