Bartolomé De Las Casas And The Conquest Of The Americas

"Clayton has written a wonderful biography of Las Casas-churchman, thinker, author, reformer and crusader for justice. A major figure in Spanish American history, Las Casas is presented as a complex man, controversial in the world he lived in, and influential in creating a perception of Spain and her colonies that endured for centuries." Susan Socolow, Emory University

"This is a full biographical study of one of the major figures of the early modern period, a person who left his mark on his contemporaries and posterity as much as the great monarchs of Spain, England and France...It should be a new classic on the life and significance of one of the major figures in the struggle for human justice." Noble David Cook, Florida International University

"Lawrence Clayton has produced an excellent, insightful and highly nuanced biography that does full justice to the most extraordinary advocate of human rights in the history of the Americas, Bartolome de las Casas. Exhaustively researched, sympathetically written and enhanced by illustrations, maps and an excellent bibliographic essay, this work constitutes an extraordinary contribution to the growing literature on the subject." Franklin Knight Johns Hopkins University

After Christopher Columbus, Bartolome 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.

Lawrence A. Clayton is Professor, Department of History at the University of Alabama. His books include A History of Modern Latin America, second edition (2004), Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (1999), and The De Soto Chronicles (editor, 1993). He is currently writing the first major biography of Las Casas in more than a generation