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Another Face of Empire - Bartolome de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Paperback, Annotated Ed)
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Another Face of Empire - Bartolome de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Paperback, Annotated Ed)
Series: Latin America Otherwise
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The Spanish cleric Bartolome de Las Casas is a key figure in the
history of Spain's conquest of the Americas. Las Casas condemned
the torture and murder of natives by the conquistadores in reports
to the Spanish royal court and in tracts such as A Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies (1552). For his unrelenting
denunciation of the colonialists' atrocities, Las Casas has been
revered as a noble protector of the Indians and as a pioneering
anti-imperialist. He has become a larger-than-life figure invoked
by generations of anticolonialists in Europe and Latin America.
Separating historical reality from myth, Daniel Castro provides a
nuanced, revisionist assessment of the friar's career, writings,
and political activities. Castro argues that Las Casas was very
much an imperialist. Intent on converting the Indians to
Christianity, the religion of the colonizers, Las Casas simply
offered the natives another face of empire: a paternalistic,
ecclesiastical imperialism. Castro contends that while the friar
was a skilled political manipulator, influential at what was
arguably the world's most powerful sixteenth-century imperial
court, his advocacy on behalf of the natives had little impact on
their lives. Analyzing Las Casas's extensive writings, Castro
points out that in his many years in the Americas, Las Casas spent
very little time among the indigenous people he professed to love,
and he made virtually no effort to learn their languages. He saw
himself as an emissary from a superior culture with a divine
mandate to impose a set of ideas and beliefs on the colonized. He
differed from his compatriots primarily in his antipathy to
violence as the means for achieving conversion.
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