Bartolomé de las Casas

Lived

1484–1566

Era

Reformation

Where

Hispaniola, Mexico and Spain

Tradition

Roman Catholic

Arguing that the peoples of the Americas were being destroyed

A Spanish colonist and slaveholder in Hispaniola who, preparing a sermon in 1514, concluded that everything he was doing was indefensible, freed his own labourers, became a Dominican, and spent fifty years pressing the Spanish crown to stop.

Why it matters

His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is a catalogue of atrocity written to be read at court, and it worked well enough to produce the New Laws of 1542, which the colonists largely ignored. At Valladolid in 1550 he argued against Sepúlveda that the indigenous peoples were fully rational and could not be justly enslaved. He also, early on, proposed importing African slaves instead, and later repudiated it as the worst thing he had done.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.