Captaincy General of Venezuela

The Captaincy General of Venezuela, also known as the Kingdom of Venezuela, was an administrative district of colonial Spain created on 8 September 1777 through the Royal Decree of Graces, as part of the Bourbon Reforms. It gave the Venezuelan provinces more autonomy: until then they had been under the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo — and thus first the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later the Viceroyalty of New Granada — but the new captaincy general established a unified government covering political, military, fiscal, ecclesiastical and judicial affairs, seated at Caracas, and oriented the province of Maracaibo towards the province of Caracas. Its creation laid the groundwork for the future nation of Venezuela. When the New Granadan viceroyalty was reestablished in 1739, the governor-captain general of Caracas already held military jurisdiction over the provinces of Maracaibo, Cumaná, Guayana and Trinidad, and the 1777 decree consolidated this into a single district. The captaincy general lasted until the wars of independence: Venezuela declared independence in 1811, and after the campaigns of the 1810s the district was finally extinguished with the establishment of the first Republic of Colombia, its territory forming the new republic's heartland.