Book description
Bartolom de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish
colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who
sailed on one of Columbus's voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the
wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting
the Indian community. He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and
slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had
descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip
II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the
Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate
work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the
idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries.
Bartolome de las Casas was born in Seville around 1484. At the age of
eighteen he left for the New World, where he participated in the
conquest of Cuba and witnessed the first full-scale massacre of an
Indian community. He became a priest and entered the Dominican order.
He dedicated himself to the protection and defence of the Indians.
Anthony Pagden teaches in the Department of History at John Hopkins
University, Baltimore. He is the author of The Fall of Natural Man and
Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination.
Nigel Griffin read modern languages at Oxford and was a Fellow of
New College in the 1970s. He now concentrates on writing and
translating and has worked for both the UN and the World Bank.
