Bartolomé de las Casas, Defense of the Indians (c. 1550)

Abstract Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was a White Spanish clergyman and one of the most vocal sixteenth-century opponents of the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. When Spanish King Charles I appointed scholars to scrutinize the morality of the conquest in 1550, they asked Las Casas to present evidence against its legitimacy and to debate this issue with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in Valladolid, Spain. This chapter is a selection from Las Casas’s response to Sepúlveda. It comprises central portions of his argument against Sepúlveda’s claim that American Indians are natural slaves in Aristotle’s sense and that this justifies their subjugation and enslavement by Spanish colonizers. Natural slaves, according to Aristotle, are human beings who are naturally destined for slavery. Las Casas examines different ways of understanding Aristotle’s claim that so-called barbarians are natural slaves and then argues that it cannot justify the conquest and enslavement of American Indians.