Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas

After Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas is the single most important figure in the period known as the Encounter, a time of intensive conflict between Europeans and the people of the Americas following Columbus’s voyages. In this book, Clayton provides a short history of the age of exploration and the conquest of the Americas told through the experience and acts of Las Casas.

Las Casas, a Dominican friar, witnessed the brutality of the Spanish explorers early in the conquest. Motivated above all by Christian scripture, he turned on the conquistadors with a passion that made him the most prominent defender and protector of the native peoples of the Americas. He led a lifelong crusade to secure justice for Amerindians within a Christian framework of justice and equality. Through Las Casas’s story, Clayton explores the major events and conflicts of the period, including the relationship between colonizers and colonized and the burgeoning trade in African slaves.

The book allows readers to enter the world of the Encounter through the eyes of an individual who not only lived through the period, but was crucial in forming it. In doing so, it provides a foundation for understanding the early days of Spanish exploration, settlement, and conquest, a period which set the stage for the creation of the modern civilization of the Americas.