El prejuicio racial en el Nuevo Mundo

by Lewis Hanke

En el siglo IV a. de C. Aristóteles formuló su teoría de la servidumbre natural, según la cual algunos hombres nacían destinados por la naturaleza para servir como esclavos. Veinte siglos más tarde, cuando los españoles conquistaron América, aquella vieja concepción que apoyaba la esclavitud fue desempolvada y esgrimida por doctos eruditos para justificar muchos de los malos tratos que recibían los naturales del Nuevo Mundo. Lewis Hanke describe aquí el pensamiento y la acción del más decidido opositor de tal doctrina, Bartolomé de las Casas, quien dedicó la mayor parte de su vida a defender los derechos de los indígenas.

Genres: Race, History

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

The debate that rattled an empire and cost multiple lives in the New World. The weird title of this book, deliberately provocative on the part of colonial history Original Gangster Lewis Hanke, drew my attention when I first saw it on the bookshelf of a favorite professor. That's one mark of a masterpiece. Hanke gives the Spanish Crown credit for sponsoring debate on the political, economic and ultimately racial status of the millions of native Americans they encountered and conquered after 1492, from Cuba to Patagonia. Who were these strange people and where did they fall in the European categories of classification, dating back to Aristotle in his POLITICS, of slave, barbarian or free-born citizen? How did Catholic doctrine, since the conquest was undertaken under the banner of "Their Most Catholic Majesties", the king and queen of Spain, and later emperor Charles V, and blessed by the Pope, inform this debate? Could the Indians be enslaved like the Africans? Columbus had enslaved some five hundred Taino Indians during his voyages, and no Spaniard found fault in that decision. The conquest of Mexico by Cortez in 1521 and the Inca empire by Pizarro during the 1530s soon made that precedent irrelevant. What should be done with millions of new colonial subjects to exploit the mines, sugar mills, corn fields and tobacco farms of the Americas? The genocide of the natives on the island of Hispaniola convinced the Spanish Dominican friar who bore witness to it, Bartolome de las Casas, that forced Indian labor must be stopped and the native Americans declared wards of the Spanish church and state. In 1550 he appeared before the Crown in Valladolid, the royal capital, to plead his case. (I had a colleague who swore once he could write an entire history of colonial Spanish America without mentioning De las Casas even once. He succeeded.) His opposite number, the lay theologian Juan Sepulveda, responded by citing the idol of all European humanists, Aristotle: Some peoples were natural-born slaves and the Spanish conquest of the Americas and its native population, was just, for it had been launched for the cause of saving souls. When you have Christ and Aristotle on your side that is a hard combination to beat. Nevertheless, The royals sided with de las Casas. Indian slavery was outlawed, and women were to be excluded from the Spanish system of granting free Indian labor to those conquerors who expanded the lands of the Crown---the encomienda. Did any of this matter to the Indians? Not really, and that is where Hanke's book falls apart. Spanish raiding parties still enslaved Indians captured as prisoners of war in "just wars", declared so by the church. Indian young men died by the hundreds of thousands, some authorities say even millions, by serving under the encomienda. Hanke thinks the colonial enterprise was dictated from Spain and obeyed by the Crown's subjects in the New World. In fact, the opposite was closer to the truth. When it came to making profits off Indian labor no humanitarian legislation from Spain was going the mean much in Mexico or Peru with their rich silver mines in need of indigenous workers. ARISTOTLE AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN sees the roots of racism in the Spanish empire in law, philosophy and theology. A better place to look is pure economics. What worked to make the conquerors rich became the law of the land.

[Teddy Dodger · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘The decision of the Spanish crown and council of the Indies not to stigmatise the American Indians as natural slaves, according to the dictates of Aristotle, becomes one of the milestones on the long road, still under construction, which slowly wheels towards a civilisation based on the dignity of man, that is to say, of all men"

Good but as that quote will read to anyone who studies history after 1959, the book comes across as more than a tad whiggish, and is now likely out of date.