
Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism
Daniel Castro
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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About Daniel Castro
Reviews for Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism
Michael Pasquier
Interventions
“Daniel Castro deserves praise for the clarity and freshness of his insights on Las Casas in this book. He points out and eliminates much of the tendentiousness that so often typifies writings about the great Franciscan and thereby composes a highly useful book.”
John E. Kicza
Renaissance Quarterly
“This is an important contribution to the literature on Las Casas. It removes the halo and sees the man within the context of his time, and looks into the motivations for his actions and positions. It simply is one of the most refreshing analyses of Las Casas to have appeared in quite some time.”
John F. Schwaller
Bulletin of Latin American Research