Black slavery is as unjust as Indian slavery
Bartolomé de las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the violent colonial abuse of indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization.
Unlike the other priests who sought to destroy all of the indigenous peoples' native books and writings, he was strictly opposed to this action. Although he failed to save the indigenous peoples of the Western Indies, his efforts resulted in several improvements in the legal status of the natives, and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism. Las Casas is often seen as one of the first advocates for universal conception of human dignity (later human rights).
Las Casas returned to Guatemala in 1537 wanting to employ his new method of conversion based on two principles:
to preach the Gospel to all men and treat them as equals, and
to assert that conversion must be voluntary and based on knowledge and understanding of the Faith.It was important for Las Casas that this method be tested without meddling from secular colonists, so he chose a territory in the heart of Guatemala where there were no previous colonies and where the natives were considered fierce and war-like. Because of the fact that the land had not been possible to conquer by military means, the governor of Guatemala, Alonso de Maldonado, agreed to sign a contract promising that if the venture was successful he would not establish any new encomiendas in the area. Las Casas's group of friars established a Dominican presence in Rabinal, Sacapulas and Cobán. Through the efforts of Las Casas's missionaries the so-called "Land of War" came to be called "Verapaz", "True Peace". Las Casas's strategy was to teach Christian songs to merchant Indian Christians who then ventured into the area. In this way he was successful in converting several native chiefs, among them those of Atitlán and Chichicastenango, and in building several churches in the territory named Alta Verapaz. These congregated a group of Christian Indians in the location of what is now the town of Rabinal. In 1538 Las Casas was recalled from his mission by Bishop Marroquín who wanted him to go to Mexico and then on to Spain in order to seek more Dominicans to assist in the mission. Las Casas left Guatemala for Mexico, where he stayed for more than a year before setting out for Spain in 1540.
In Spain, Las Casas started securing official support for the Guatemalan mission, and he managed to get a royal decree forbidding secular intrusion into the Verapaces for the following five years. He also informed the Theologians of Salamanca, led by Francisco de Vitoria, of the mass baptism practiced by the Franciscans, resulting in a dictum condemning the practice as sacrilegious.
But apart from the clerical business, Las Casas had also traveled to Spain for his own purpose: to continue the struggle against the colonists' mistreatment of the Indians. The encomienda had, in fact, legally been abolished in 1523, but it had been reinstituted in 1526, and in 1530 a general ordinance against slavery was reversed by the Crown. For this reason it was a pressing matter for Bartolomé de las Casas to plead once again for the Indians with Charles V who was by now Holy Roman Emperor and no longer a boy. He wrote a letter asking for permission to stay in Spain a little longer in order to argue for the Emperor that conversion and colonization were best achieved by peaceful means.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
He began writing A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542 (later published in Seville in 1552) about the mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in colonial times and sent to then-Prince Philip II of Spain. One of the stated purposes for writing the account was Las Casas's fear of Spain coming under divine punishment and his concern for the souls of the native peoples. The account was one of the first attempts by a Spanish writer of the colonial era to depict the unfair treatment that the indigenous people endured during the early stages of the Spanish conquest of the Greater Antilles, particularly the island of Hispaniola. Las Casas's point of view can be described as being heavily against some of the Spanish methods of colonization, which, as he described them, inflicted great losses on the indigenous occupants of the islands. In addition, his critique towards the colonizers served to bring awareness to his audience on the true meaning of Christianity, to dismantle any misconceptions on evangelization.
When the hearings started in 1542, Las Casas presented a narrative of atrocities against the natives of the Indies that would later be published in 1552 as "Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias".
Before a council consisting of Cardinal García de Loaysa, the Count of Osorno, Bishop Fuenleal and several members of the Council of the Indies, Las Casas argued that the only solution to the problem was to remove all Indians from the care of secular Spaniards, by abolishing the encomienda system and putting them instead directly under the Crown as royal tribute-paying subjects. On November 20, 1542, the Emperor signed the New Laws abolishing the encomiendas and removing certain officials from the Council of the Indies. The New Laws made it illegal to use Indians as carriers, except where no other transport was available, it prohibited all taking of Indians as slaves, and it instated a gradual abolition of the encomienda system, with each encomienda reverting to the Crown at the death of its holders. It also exempted the few surviving Indians of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica from tribute and all requirements of personal service. However, the reforms were so unpopular back in the New World that riots broke out and threats were made against Las Casas's life. The Viceroy of New Spain, himself an encomendero, decided not to implement the laws in his domain, and instead sent a party to Spain to argue against the laws on behalf of the encomenderos. Las Casas himself was also not satisfied with the laws, as they were not drastic enough and the encomienda system was going to function for many years still under the gradual abolition plan. He drafted a suggestion for an amendment arguing that the laws against slavery were formulated in such a way that it presupposed that violent conquest would still be carried out, and he encouraged once again beginning a phase of peaceful colonization by peasants instead of soldiers.
The Repartimiento (Spanish, "distribution, partition, or division") was a colonial forced labor system imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mita of the Inca Empire or the corvée of Ancien Régime France: the natives were forced to do low-paid or unpaid labor for a certain number of weeks or months each year on Spanish-owned farms, mines, workshops (obrajes), and public projects. With the New Laws of 1542, the repartimiento was instated to substitute the encomienda system that had come to be seen as abusive and promoting unethical behavior. The repartimiento was not slavery, in that the worker is not owned outright—being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labor—and the work was intermittent. It however, created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of 16th century Peru.
The results of the New Laws were a ban slave raiding in the Americas and abolish the slavery of natives, but replaced by other systems of forced labor like the repartimiento, and the slavery of Black Africans continued.
Before Las Casas returned to Spain, he was also appointed as Bishop of Chiapas, a newly established diocese of which he took possession in 1545 upon his return to the New World. He was consecrated in the Dominican Church of San Pablo on March 30, 1544. As Archbishop Loaysa strongly disliked Las Casas, the ceremony was officiated by Loaysa's nephew, Diego de Loaysa, Bishop of Modruš, with Pedro Torres, Titular Bishop of Arbanum, and Cristóbal de Pedraza, Bishop of Comayagua, as co-consecrators. As a bishop Las Casas was involved in frequent conflicts with the encomenderos and secular laity of his diocese: among the landowners there was the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In a pastoral letter issued on March 20, 1545, Las Casas refused absolution to slave owners and encomenderos even on their death bed, unless all their slaves had been set free and their property returned to them. Las Casas furthermore threatened that anyone who mistreated Indians within his jurisdiction would be excommunicated. He also came into conflict with the Bishop of Guatemala Francisco Marroquín, to whose jurisdiction the diocese had previously belonged. To Las Casas's dismay Bishop Marroquín openly defied the New Laws. While bishop, Las Casas was the principal consecrator of Antonio de Valdivieso, Bishop of Nicaragua (1544).
The New Laws were finally repealed on October 20, 1545, riots having broken out against Las Casas, with shots being fired against him by angry colonists. After a year he had made himself so unpopular among the Spaniards of the area that he had to leave.
Having been summoned to a meeting among the bishops of New Spain to be held in Mexico City on January 12, 1546, he left his diocese, never to return. At the meeting, probably after lengthy reflection, and realizing that the New Laws were lost in Mexico, Las Casas presented a moderated view on the problems of confession and restitution of property.
Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga of Mexico and Bishop Julián Garcés of Puebla agreed completely with his new moderate stance, Bishop Vasco de Quiroga of Michoacán had minor reservations, and Bishops Francisco Marroquín of Guatemala and Juan Lopez de Zárate of Oaxaca did not object. This resulted in a new resolution to be presented to viceroy Mendoza. His last act as Bishop of Chiapas was writing a confesionario, a manual for the administration of the sacrament of confession in his diocese, still refusing absolution to unrepentant encomenderos. Las Casas appointed a vicar for his diocese and set out for Europe in December 1546, arriving in Lisbon in April 1547 and in Spain on November 1547
Las Casas returned to Spain, leaving behind many conflicts and unresolved issues. Arriving in Spain he was met by a barrage of accusations, many of them based on his Confesionario and its 12 rules, which many of his opponents found to be in essence a denial of the legitimacy of Spanish rule of its colonies, and hence a form of treason. The Crown had for example received a fifth of the large number of slaves taken in the recent Mixtón War, and so could not be held clean of guilt under Las Casas's strict rules.
In 1548 the Crown decreed that all copies of Las Casas's Confesionario be burnt, and his Franciscan adversary, Motolinia obliged and sent back a report to Spain. Las Casas defended himself by writing two treatises on the "Just Title" – arguing that the only legality with which the Spaniards could claim titles over realms in the New World was through peaceful proselytizing. All warfare was illegal and unjust and only through the papal mandate of peacefully bringing Christianity to heathen peoples could "Just Titles" be acquired.
As a part of Las Casas's defense by offense, he had to argue against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda was a doctor of theology and law who, in his book Democrates Alter, sive de justis causis apud Indos (Another Democrates /or A New Democrates, or on the Just Causes of War against the Indians) had argued that some native peoples were incapable of ruling themselves and should be pacified forcefully. The book was deemed unsound for publication by the theologians of Salamanca and Alcalá for containing unsound doctrine, but the pro-encomendero faction seized on Sepúlveda as their intellectual champion.
The Valladolid debate
In order to settle the issues, a formal debate was organized, the famous Valladolid debate, which took place in 1550–51 with Sepúlveda and Las Casas each presenting their arguments in front of a council of jurists and theologians. First Sepúlveda read the conclusions of his Democrates Alter, and then the council listened to Las Casas read his counterarguments in the form of an "Apología". Sepúlveda argued that the subjugation of certain Indians was warranted because of their sins against Natural Law; that their low level of civilization required civilized masters to maintain social order; that they should be made Christian and that this in turn required them to be pacified; and that only the Spanish could defend weak Indians against the abuses of the stronger ones. Las Casas countered that the scriptures did not in fact support war against all heathens, only against certain Canaanite tribes; that the Indians were not at all uncivilized nor lacking social order; that peaceful mission was the only true way of converting the natives; and finally that some weak Indians suffering at the hands of stronger ones was preferable to all Indians suffering at the hands of Spaniards.
The judge, Fray Domingo de Soto, summarised the arguments. Sepúlveda addressed Las Casas's arguments with twelve refutations, which were again countered by Las Casas. The judges then deliberated on the arguments presented for several months before coming to a verdict. The verdict was inconclusive, and both debaters claimed that they had won.
In 1552, the publication of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a book that had been written a decade earlier, was sent to the attention of then-prince Philip II of Spain, containing accounts of the abuses committed by some Spaniards against Native Americans during the early stages of colonization. 
The Apologetic Summary History of the People of These Indies (Spanish Apologética historia summaria de las gentes destas Indias) was first written as the 68th chapter of the General History of the Indies, but Las Casas changed it into a volume of its own, recognizing that the material was not historical. The material contained in the Apologetic History is primarily ethnographic accounts of the indigenous cultures of the Indies – the Taíno, the Ciboney, and the Guanahatabey, but it also contains descriptions of many of the other indigenous cultures that Las Casas learned about through his travels and readings. The history is apologetic because it is written as a defense of the cultural level of the Indians, arguing throughout that indigenous peoples of the Americas were just as civilized as the Roman, Greek and Egyptian civilizations—and more civilized than some European civilizations. It was in essence a comparative ethnography comparing practices and customs of European and American cultures and evaluating them according to whether they were good or bad, seen from a Christian viewpoint.
He wrote: "I have declared and demonstrated openly and concluded, from chapter 22 to the end of this whole book, that all people of these our Indies are human, so far as is possible by the natural and human way and without the light of faith – had their republics, places, towns, and cities most abundant and well provided for, and did not lack anything to live politically and socially, and attain and enjoy civil happiness.... And they equaled many nations of this world that are renowned and considered civilized, and they surpassed many others, and to none were they inferior. Among those they equaled were the Greeks and the Romans, and they surpassed them by many good and better customs. They surpassed also the English and the French and some of the people of our own Spain; and they were incomparably superior to countless others, in having good customs and lacking many evil ones." This work in which Las Casas combined his own ethnographic observations with those of other writers, and compared customs and cultures between different peoples, has been characterized as an early beginning of the discipline of anthropology.
It was in his The History of the Indies, a three-volume work begun in 1527 while Las Casas was in the Convent of Puerto de Plata, but found its final form in 1561 when he was working in the Colegio de San Gregorio, that Las Casas acknowledges the realization that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery.
Originally planned as a six-volume work, each volume describes a decade of the history of the Indies from the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 to 1520, and most of it is an eye-witness account. It was in the History of the Indies that Las Casas finally regretted his advocacy for African slavery, and included a sincere apology, writing:
"I soon repented and judged myself guilty of ignorance. I came to realize that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery... and I was not sure that my ignorance and good faith would secure me in the eyes of God." (Vol II, p. 257)
Las Casas's legacy has been highly controversial.
In the years following his death in 1566 his ideas became taboo in the Spanish realm, and he was seen as a nearly heretical extremist. The accounts written by his enemies Lopez de Gómara and Oviedo were widely read and published. As the British Empire rose to power and hostilities between the British and Spanish began, the British used Las Casas's accounts of Spanish cruelty as a political tool, as part of the foundation of what Spanish nationalists have called the Black Legend, the tendency of historians to slander Spain for its imperial past but to look mildly at the same undertakings by others such as the British.
A cinematic masterpiece captures the contradictions and hypocrisy of this set of imperialist attitudes, ideas and strategies. It is called 'Burn', and in Italian "Queimada" by the Italian film Director Gillo Pontecorvo.
The review by Amy Taubin is exactly right . . .
. . . audiences will be able to appreciate Pontecorvo's blending of cinematic romanticism with an analysis of black revolutionary struggle which is part Marx and part Franz Fanon. Unlike The Battle of Algiers, which made use of a cinema vérité style to tell the story of an actual liberation struggle, Burn! is a political allegory, styled like a costume action-adventure picture. The setting is a fictional sugar cane-producing Caribbean Island named Queimada. In the original script, this fictive island was part of the Spanish empire, which would have been a more accurate historical conceit, since Spain, rather than Portugal, was the dominant European power in the Caribbean. But since Portugal accounts for a considerably smaller share of international box-office receipts than Spain, the producers did the economically expedient thing by making the Portuguese the bad guys.
As we learn in the opening scene, Queimada (which means "burn" in Portuguese) has had a history of conflagration. In the 17th century, the Portuguese put down an uprising of the indigenous population by killing almost everyone and reducing the cane fields to scorched earth. They then rebuilt the labor force with slaves imported from Africa. By the mid-19th century (the point at which Pontecorvo's narrative begins), a slave revolt is brewing. The British see an opportunity to send the Portuguese packing and gain control of the island. Enter Marlon Brando in plantation whites and creams as Sir William Walker, the 19th-century English equivalent of a CIA operative. Walker has been sent by the British government to fan the flames of the insurrection and simultaneously to whisper encouraging words to members of the mixed-race middle-class so that when the Portuguese are routed, they will be ready to seize the reins of power. Not real power, of course, because it is British wealth to which this puppet regime will be permanently indebted.
All this comes to pass in the first half of the film in scenes that are sometimes overly schematic but just as often thrilling. Here, as in The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo is masterful at conjoining camera movement and the choreography of large groups of people so that the screen becomes charged with collective desire. Ennio Morricone's score, similar in its insistence and repetitiveness to the one he composed for The Battle of Algiers, employs the choral harmonies and modalities of Gregorian chants with a syncopated beat that has you just about leaping out of your seat when the victorious slave army, ragtag and radiant, comes dancing and prancing on the backs of plumed horses to claim the prize for their hard-won, bloody rebellion. The prize, of course, will not be theirs. The fork-tongued Walker will convince José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez), the rebel general he has mentored, that he's gone as far as he can go - that blacks cannot govern themselves or trade on the world market. "Who will buy your sugar, José?" he asks, even as the British have imposed a boycott on the island. Part I ends in compromise. Dolores is persuaded to lay down his weapons and take his army back to the cane fields. No longer slaves, they will be paid for their work, and in addition, there will be schools and hospitals - and you know the rest of that line.
Twelve years pass in a few seconds of black screen. The second half of the film is the mirror inverse of the first. Walker is sent back to Queimada to put down the insurgency he once fomented. The British have treated their freed workers no better than the Portuguese did their slaves. Dolores and his men have once again taken up arms and are fighting the government troops from hideouts in the mountains. When he refuses to negotiate with Walker, it's all-out war. As in the 17th century, the island is torched so that the fires of revolution will not spread throughout the Caribbean and beyond. Rather than the triumphant march that climaxed Part I, Pontecorvo gives us an equally riveting set piece, but this time of prolonged horror. Dolores's followers are smoked out of the burning brush. As they are forced into the open, they are slaughtered one by one as Walker watches through his spyglass.
Burn! is such an ambitious film and parts of it are so inspiring that one can't help forgiving its unresolved contradictions, the largest of which is the attempt to fit a dialectical reading of history into the form of an action drama with the opposing forces of colonizer and colonized embodied in the two leading characters. Brando often remarked that he was proudest of his work in Burn!, and certainly it's his performance that makes the film more than just a series of visually spectacular set pieces, and riveting from beginning to end. In terms of Brando's career, one can look at Burn! as a match with Reflections in a Golden Eye, which was made just two years earlier. In both films, Brando plays a member of the ruling elite who is eaten up by self-loathing and fights desperately against his attraction to another man. Reflection is specifically about repressed homosexuality. In Burn!, sexual desire is an undercurrent of the power game between Walker and Dolores.
Brando plants the notion right at the start when we see him looking at Queimada from a boat arriving in the harbor and fingering a lavender scarf flung casually around his throat. Brando knew how to communicate entire subtexts through a prop and the way he handled it. You can bet he didn't choose lavender because it was a pretty color. There is, however, a behind-the-scenes story: Pontecorvo, who was reputed to be highly superstitious, felt about lavender the way John Ashcroft feels about calico cats - that they are signs of the devil. Brando was at war with Pontecorvo throughout the production, and he may have chosen to make that bit of lavender silk the focus of the film's opening shot just to spite him. Nevertheless, a suggestion has been planted in the viewer's mind, and it's reinforced in the scenes that follow where we begin to see that Walker conducts his power games as he would a seduction. Walker seduces Dolores into becoming an outlaw and then the general of an insurgent army; having gotten what he wants, he subsequently abandons him. When he comes back and tries the game a second time, Dolores has become his own man and will have none of it.
And so Walker has to bring him to his knees by killing his followers. But at the last moment, he can't bring himself to kill the opponent he has been so obsessed with. If Dolores dies, he will not only become a martyr for the cause of freedom, he will escape Walker's power. One of the most amazing moments in Brando's performance comes when Walker is preparing himself for a last ditch effort to persuade Dolores to escape hanging by going into exile. Walker is aware that he has already lost the game, and as he tries to pull himself together to confront Dolores, he notices his own belly - a belly that he has most carefully concealed beneath tight pants and jackets buttoned - he knows how power is invested in the presentation of self. It's this belly, now bulging out in the open, that signals his loss of control over his own and Dolores's destiny. And then he makes the most extraordinary decision. Rather than trying to conceal the betrayal of the flesh, he lets it show, perhaps because he has nothing to lose but more likely because he seizes on letting it all hang out - as they were wont to say in 1968 - as the only manipulative strategy left in his arsenal.
Black Legend - White Legend
A 1598 engraving by Theodor de Bry depicting a Spaniard feeding Indian children to his dogs. De Bry's works are characteristic of the anti-Spanish propaganda that originated as a result of the Eighty Years' War.
In the historiography on conquest and empire, the term Black Legend (Spanish: La leyenda negra) refers to a supposed tendency in historical writing demonising Spain and the Spanish Empire, its people and its culture, as uniquely cruel and bigoted. It is also used to refer to contemporary and near contemporary propaganda attacking the actions of the Spanish Empire, particularly that published in England and the Netherlands. This propaganda is theorised to have been "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain was "uniquely evil."
While those who defend the existence of the Black Legend acknowledge that there is much documented evidence of atrocities by all European nations during the conquest of the Americas, and the Inquisition represented a period of cruel excess; they suggest foreign authors lay this legacy on the Spanish without balance and as a somehow intrinsic element of Spanish character. Its proponents claim that the Black Legend originated in the 16th century, a time of strong rivalry between European colonial powers, and served as anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda.
Though the term black legend for describing a supposed anti-Spanish bias in European historiography was coined by Emilia Pardo Bazán in a conference, Paris, April 18, 1899, Julián Juderías was among the first to describe and denounce this phenomenon. His book The Black Legend and the Historical Truth (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra y la Verdad Histórica), a critique published in 1914, claims that this type of biased historiography has presented Spanish history in a deeply negative light, purposely ignoring positive achievements or advances. Later writers have supported and developed Juderías's critique. In 1958, Charles Gibson wrote that Spain and the Spanish Empire were historically presented as "cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality".
Opposition to Las Casas reached its climax in historography with Spanish right-wing, nationalist historians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries constructing a pro-Spanish White Legend, arguing that the Spanish Empire was benevolent and just and denying any adverse consequences of Spanish colonialism.[89][90] Spanish pro-imperial historians such as Menéndez y Pelayo, Menéndez Pidal, and J. Pérez de Barrada depicted Las Casas as a madman, describing him as a "paranoic" and a monomaniac given to exaggeration, and as a traitor towards his own nation. Menéndez Pelayo also accused Las Casas of having been instrumental in suppressing the publication of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda's "Democrates Alter" (also called Democrates Secundus) out of spite, but other historians find that to be unlikely since it was rejected by the theologians of both Alcalá and Salamanca, who were unlikely to be influenced by Las Casas.
The label "White Legend" is used by some historians to describe a historiographic approach that they consider to go too far in trying to counter the Black Legend, and which consequently ends up painting an uncritical or idealized image of Spanish colonial practices. Such an approach has been described as characteristic of Nationalist Spanish historiography during the regime of Francisco Franco, which associated itself with the imperial past couched in positive terms. Some, such as Benjamin Keen, have criticized the works of John Fiske and Lewis Hanke as going too far towards idealizing Spanish history.
Las Casas has also often been accused of exaggerating the atrocities he described in the Indies, some scholars holding that the initial population figures given by him were too high, which would make the population decline look worse than it actually was, and that epidemics of European disease were the prime cause of the population decline, not violence and exploitation. Demographic studies such as those of colonial Mexico by Sherburne F. Cook in the mid-20th century suggested that the decline in the first years of the conquest was indeed drastic, ranging between 80 and 90%, due of course to many different causes but all ultimately traceable to the arrival of the Europeans. The overwhelming main cause was disease introduced by the Europeans. It has also been noted that exaggeration of numbers was the norm in writing in 16th-century accounts, and both contemporary detractors and supporters of Las Casas were guilty of similar exaggerations.
It has also been suggested that the atrocities that Las Casas described were exaggerated or even invented, but that is not generally considered likely as Las Casas was far from the only person to be deeply worried about abuse and mistreatment of the Indians. The Dominican friars Antonio de Montesinos and Pedro de Córdoba had reported extensive violence already in the first decade of the conquest of the Indies, and throughout the conquest of the Americas, there were reports of abuse of the natives by friars and priests and ordinary citizens, and many massacres of indigenous people were reported in full by those who perpetrated them. Even some of Las Casas's enemies, such as Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, reported many gruesome atrocities committed against the Indians by the colonizers. All in all, modern historians tend to disregard the numerical figures given by Las Casas, but they maintain that his general picture of a violent and abusive conquest represented reality.
One persistent point of criticism has been Las Casas's repeated suggestions of replacing Indian with African slave labor. Even though he regretted that position towards the end of his life and included an apology in his History of the Indies, some later criticism held him responsible for the institution of the Atlantic slave trade. One detractor, the abolitionist David Walker, called Las Casas a "wretch... stimulated by sordid avarice only," holding him responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Africans. Other historians, such as John Fiske writing in 1900, denied that Las Casas's suggestions affected the development of the slave trade. Benjamin Keen likewise did not consider Las Casas to have had any substantial impact on the slave trade, which was well in place before he began writing. That view is contradicted by Sylvia Wynter, who argued that Las Casas's 1516 Memorial was the direct cause of Charles V granting permission in 1518 to transport the first 4,000 African slaves to Jamaica.
is also often cited as a predecessor of the liberation theology movement. He is commemorated by the Church of England in the Calendar of Saints on July 20, The Episcopal Church (USA) on July 18, and at the Evangelical Lutheran Church on July 17. In the Catholic Church, the Dominicans introduced his cause for canonization in 1976.[105] In 2002 the Church began the process for his beatification.
Bartolomé de las Casas has also come to be seen as an early advocate for a concept of universal human rights.
He was among the first to develop a view of unity among humankind, stating that:
"All people of the world are humans,"and that they had a natural right to liberty – a combination of Thomist rights philosophy with Augustinian political theology.
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