Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
Las Casas’s foundational claim - that the native peoples of the Americas were fully human and fully rational, possessed of natural liberty and legitimate dominion over their own lands and rulers, and therefore no man’s ‘natural slaves.’
You learned that Las Casas grounded the rights of the Indians in their full rationality (‘all the peoples of the world are men’), argued that they held genuine dominion - real ownership and legitimate self-rule - before contact, and concluded that natural liberty could not be stripped from a rational peopl…
Leads to Francisco de Vitoria.
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