Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
Las Casas’s <em>Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies</em> (1552) - the book that put the Spanish conquest itself on trial, what its indictment actually argues, why he aimed it at the Crown, and the ‘Black Legend’ it later seeded.
You learned that the Short Account was written in 1542 and published in 1552 to move the Crown, that it argues the conquest was mass murder of innocent, rational peoples rather than a glorious civilizing mission, and that its lurid catalogue of cruelty was later seized on by Spain’s enemies as the ‘Black L…
Leads to Michel de Montaigne.
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