LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE

Author(s): Diego von Vacano

Source: History of Political Thought, Autumn 2012, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn 2012), pp. 401-
426
.Published by: Imprint Academic Ltd
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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE

Diego von Vacano1

Abstract: One of the central problems of modernity has been the role race plays in
politics. However, we are still not sure where the concept of race first emerges in the
history of political thought. I argue that the first theorist to lay the grounds for a racial
conception in politics is the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In his
effort to defend the 'rights' of the Amerindians, Las Casas constructs racial categories
through his rhetorical enterprise. Rather than being a historian, a proto-anthropologist,
or a defender of the 'Indians', Las Casas was chiefly a rhetorician of empire. In this
enterprise, his account of Amerindian identity, bodies, appearance and culture created
a racialized understanding of the newly discovered peoples of the Americas. By exam
ining the birth of race in the writings of Las Casas, we learn of his fundamentally rhe
torical project, the centrality of race to modernity, and Las Casas' influence on the
early-modern Latin American intellectual tradition.
Keywords: race, Las Casas, Latin America, ethnicity, empire, state, Spain, Amer
indian, Modernity, rhetoric, identity, aesthetic, Christian, Catholic, synthesis.

Introduction
There is a paradox in Bartolomé de Las Casas' corpus. On the one hand he

was committed to the idea that all human beings were equals under the grace
of God; on the other hand, he was a staunch proponent of Spanish imperial
ism, which denied equal political status to the communities of the 'Indies'
relative to Spain.2 Yet by defending the Spanish Crown, Las Casas con
structed a perspective that allowed him to seek the incorporation of all
non-Europeans living in the Americas into the imperial fold. This led him to
view the indigenous Americans as potential subjects of the Spanish monarchy
on the same plane as those living in Iberia. While his adversaries, particularly
Juan Ginés de Sepûlveda, argued that the natives were homunculi, or sub
human creatures, Las Casas proposed that they were in fact members of the
human race, or linaje humano, as he put it. Las Casas' position was part of the
concern — in contrast to the French and British
Spanish empire's Portuguese,
empires
— with the very essence of human nature that was elicited by the 'dis
covery' of difference.3

1
Texas A&M University, Political Science Department, 2047 Allen Building, Col
lege Station, Texas 77843, USA. Email: [email protected]
2
See Daniel of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous
Castro, Another Face
Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC, 2007), pp. 150-8, passim.
3
The French and British imperial justifications relied less on inquiries about defini
tions of humanity and the expansion of a Christian mission than on the concept of res
nullius, the legitimate taking over of unoccupied territory (see Anthony Pagden, Lords of
all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1492-1830 (New
Haven, 1998), p. 76). The ideas of Juan Nuix are an exception.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXIII. No. 3. Autumn 2012

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402 D. VON VACANO

It is in this debate and in other forms of adversarial and explicitly political

discourse that Las Casas inaugurates the process that produced the seeds of what
would later be called 'race'. Had it not been for his response to antagonists, he
would not have been able to insist on the full humanity first of the indigenous
peoples and later of the African slaves and their descendants in the Americas.4
Rather than seeing him as mainly engaged in a proto-anthropological quest to
understand diverse cultures, Las Casas in fact should be considered as one of
the central (if inadvertent) contributors to the intellectual scaffolding that
allowed the early-modern construction of racialization. This is an important
distinction, for through it we can distance ourselves from an interpretation of
Las Casas as a proto-scientific thinker and see him as what he really was: a

partisan rhetorician.5
Beneath the layers of theology, history, proto-anthropology, jurisprudence
and ethics that Las Casas is usually known for, his project is fundamentally
rhetorical.6 It was not only against some soldiers, friars or Sepulveda himself
that Las Casas argued. He also sought to persuade the monarchy itself,
embodied by Emperor Charles V as well as Philip II, to change the course of
Spanish policies in the New World.7 The thrust of his argument was that the
incorporation of the natives into the Crown as subjects was a moral and logi
cal imperative because they were members of the human race, not of separate
or even non-human lineage. Persuasion is the supreme aim of Las Casas' life
time of writing.
The primary value of Las Casas' work with respect to the question of 'what
is race' lies in its modernity. While many, if not most, commentators have
believed that he was basically a Thomistic, Aristotelian thinker, his oeuvre in

4 As
Pagden avers, the Spanish did not choose to enslave according to human pheno
type. In other words, there was nothing particularly salient about Africans that made
them more suitable for slavery; it was a matter of legal status. However, Pagden neglects
to think critically about the term 'race', even as he employs it. See Anthony Pagden, The
Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology
(New York, 1982), p. 33. Before his own conversion, Las Casas advocated the use of
African slaves, who, he argued, could do double the work of Indians. See V Centenario
del Primer Viaje a America de Bartolomé de Las Casas, ed. Manuel Chaves Gonzalez
(Seville, 2003), p. 19.
5
I use the term 'scientific' here in the broad sense of Wissenschaft: the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. This is what is problematically implied in understandings of
Las Casas as a proto-anthropologist or historian.
6
Castro does not point to the rhetorical method of Las Casas (see Castro, Another
Face of Empire, p. 167).
7
See the letter of October 1543 written by Las Casas to Charles V, where he closes

'praying to God for the greater estate and domain of your Lordship', Bartolomé de Las
Casas, Obras complétas, ed. Paulino Castaneda Delgado (Madrid, 1988) (hereafter OC),
Vol. 13, Ch. XIII, pp. 161-6).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 403

fact that it undermines

shows a fundamental tenet of the Ancients:8 that is, the

antinomy of 'the civilized' and 'the barbarian'. Although he employed the

concept of barbarism throughout his work, as if to show that the Aristotelian
schema is relevant, what he in effect does is to show the brutality and bestiality
of the Europeans and exaggerates the docility and goodness of the Amer
indians. In other words, Europeans are in fact more barbaric, while the natives
of the Americas are civilized, closer to that of an ideal, paradisiacal Christian
modernity. For Las Casas, Christianity is a modernizing force because it is
civilizing, as it moves people away from violence and chaos. He shows that
the categories of 'barbarian' and 'civilized' are archaic. To be sure, he did
employ Thomistic, Aristotelian ideas, but the effect of his oeuvre is to under
mine this intellectual edifice of the Ancient and Medieval worlds and to usher
in a new way of thinking.
While there were some early modern thinkers such as Paracelsus and

Giordano Bruno, as well as Sepûlveda, who argued that there are discrete and

distinct human types in the world, they did so with hierarchical gradations. It
is Las Casas who is the first to recognize human variation while seeking to
incorporate diverse groups into a unitary, non-hierarchical understanding of
both the human species and a single political community. This process is one
of synthesis, for it aggregates diversity and makes it into unity. But it is not a
story of pluralism or toleration: Las Casas did not argue for the respect of mul
tiple ways of life and the need for coexistence or a modus vivendi\ neither did
he propose that Spain should tolerate, accept, or view as equal the civiliza
tions or groups that were found in the Americas.9 He was a militant Catholic

imperialist who sought the incorporation of these new groups into the Crown
in the manner of synthesis: the agglomeration of diverse elements into a uni
tary, coherent and improved whole.
More accurately, it is the universalism of both the Church and the Empire
that pushes him to seek the incorporation of the natives into the Spanish
fold.10 Thus, we cannot understand Las Casas as a 'pacifist liberal demo

crat', as Edmundo O'Gorman rightly tells us.11 We must look at the totality
of his idearium to understand his relevance to the theoretical makings of
race. Throughout his vast opus we find the seeds of race, but it is best

8
Contra Howard J. Wiarda, The Soul ofLatin America (Hartford, CT, 2003), p. 84.
9
Contra Cary Nederman, Worlds of Difference (University Park, PA, 2000), p. 110.
The line from Ciceronian rationality does not lead directly to full equality and toleration
because Las Casas urges for the incorporation or integration of Amerindians into the
Spanish fold through imperial means.
10
The Spanish Empire was 'the true heir of Rome' in the sense of possessing a
global, integrative mission (see Pagden, Lords of all the World, p. 127). Alfonso de
Valdés and Juan Luis Vives both argued in favour of Spain's universal monarchy. Some,
such as Alonso de Castrillo, did oppose it.
11
Edmundo O'Gorman, Cuatro historiadores de Indias (Mexico City, 1963), pp.
113-14.

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404 D. VON VACANO

encapsulated in the rhetorical force of the Short Account of the Destruction

of the Indies}2 This text has been decried as polemical and propagandistic,
and even as the least representative of Las Casas' fundamental personality.13
However, it is precisely here that we can find the key component of Las
Casas' originality.14
The fact that Las Casas' project is fundamentally rhetorical is crucial to our
analysis of the birth of 'race'. It shows that he conceived of the nascent
processes of racialization as quintessentially political, rather than rooted in
biology. Rhetoric, as the effort to persuade, is a political instrument. It
attempts to change minds in order to achieve a manipulation or transformation
of power. Las Casas' chief method is rhetorical (and not proto-scientific,
quasi-anthropological, philosophical, or even religious) because he con
ceived of incipient racial ideas within the context of political contestation and
argumentation in Spain's rule over the 'Indies'. His use of rhetoric thus tells
us that 'race' is at heart a political construct in the early modern period. It
shows us that he constructed 'racial' categories in the realm of words, not
using science. This means he employed artifice: rather than using biological
conceptions of discrete human groups, he created, through texts, artificial cat
egorizations. This entails a move away from a biological basis. In turn, it dis
tances his work from the
naturalism immanent in Aristotelian and Thomistic
accounts differentiation. This is what makes
of human Las Casas an early
modern thinker rather than merely a faithful follower of pre-modern natural
law. As such, he lays the foundation for an understanding of racial identities

that are constructed rather than taken as naturally fixed or given.

In what follows, I begin with a brief contextualization of the friar's life.
Then I posit that the chief methodology of his entire opus was rhetorical. This
places the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies squarely at the centre
of his writings. Using this text as a lens for his entire oeuvre, we see the crucial
place the Amerindians' sentience has not only in that book but in Las Casas'
philosophical anthropology as a whole. The emphasis on feeling rather than
reason militates against the Ancients and further pushes Las Casas into a mod

ern mindset, owing to its implicit critique of Aristotelian thought and its use of
an aesthetic, sensory basis of morality. I show that his rhetorical method is
also present in his vast historiography. I then conclude the article by pointing
to his early use of aesthetic principles to note his concern not merely with the

12
Entitled Brevisima Relaciôn de la Destruiciôn [sic] de las Indias.
Espafiola del siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1957), pp.
13
Joseph Hoffner, La etica colonial
260-1.
14
It is telling that J.A. Fernândez-Santamaria pays scant attention to Las Casas and
prefers to focus on Vives, Vitoria and Sepiilveda in his otherwise instructive The State,
War, and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516-1559 ' (New York,
1977), passim. This is perhaps due to the polemical nature of Las Casas oeuvre.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 405

Amerindians' culture, but with their somatic form as well, something that is
integral to the making of 'race'.

Las Casas' Transatlantic Journey

Much uncertainty surrounds Las Casas' early life. Triana, the quarter in
Seville known as the birthplace of many a famous matador, was the place
where Las thought to have been born around
Casas is 1485.15 The intense

Andalusian forge the explorers

sun would and adventurers who would seek

fortune in the Americas. One of them was Las Casas: a man who initially
travelled to the Americas at an early age seeking gold and trying to escape
poverty, something common all over Spain at the time.16 Las Casas' own

ethnic background is still disputed. Some are of the opinion that he was of
French origin, given that he often signed his name as 'Casaus'. Yet others
believe he may have been embroiled personally in the issue of limpieza de
sangre, as there is speculation that he had family ties to a converso Jewish
background.17
This conjecture regarding the possible Jewish origin of Las Casas provides
a window into the nascent debates about 'race' in the Iberian peninsula.
Before Las Casas was born, the debate over 'purity of blood' in Spain was
raging. 'The polemic of blood was red-hot in the sixteenth century', as

Huerga tells us.18 Was Las Casas' lineage of 'new Christian' or 'old Christian'
descent? In other words, did he come from those who may have converted
from Judaism to Christianity? There is no definitive evidence to settle this
question.19 However, it shows how, even before Las Casas would write about
different human kinds in the Americas, Spain itself was gripped, at the social
level, by the preoccupation over the normative implications of a physical
human element, i.e. blood. An invisible physical characteristic carried much
moral weight, for, as Anthony Grafton has explained, the fear that Jews were
essentially dangerous owing to their difference at the level of the soul was
manifested by the debate over individuals' purity of blood.20 In the trials of
the Inquisition, it was inevitable to confront the question of blood lineage, or
the accused person's 'racial background'.21 The term 'tener su raza', around

15
See OC, I, p. 30.
16
V Centenario, p. 7.
17
OC, I, pp. 32,396. Thus, even Las Casas' own identity is one of mixed, uncertain
origins.
18
Alvero Huerga, 'Vida y Obras', OC, I, p. 31.
19
Interestingly, Las Casas never mentions his mother in any of his writings. Thus, we
do not have access to his possible Jewish origin from this perspective.
20
Anthony Grafton, Baldwin Lecture, Princeton University, 30 March 2009. http://
www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/news/baldwin/ (accessed 26 January 2010).
21
Huerga, 'Vida y Obras', OC, I, p. 31.

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406 D. VON VACANO

1552, meant to come from converso (i.e. Jewish or Muslim) origins.22 While
this meaning does not have direct consequences for Las Casas' subsequent

writings on the Amerindian's 'race', it does show that he lived in a context

where nascent racial characteristics such as blood lineage were thought to
have moral implications.
Triana was the locus of the expeditionary impulse, where the echoes of
expeditions in the Americas were first heard. Las Casas recalls Columbus's
departure from Seville to Barcelona in 1493 after his first trip, the most
important event for the city at the close of the fifteenth century. He would
describe the 'Indians, who were seven in number . . . since the others had

died... He took many green and red parrots, as well as guaizas, masks made
of fish bones ... the finest gold, and many things never before seen in
Spain'.23 Las Casas' own father arrived in Seville in 1499, having partici
pated in the second voyage to the Americas led by Columbus. In 1501-2, at
the age of seventeen,24 Las Casas made his first trans-Atlantic voyage of dis

covery and self-transformation, probably accompanying his father, Pedro

de Las Casas. His initial impetus was not at all related to the desire to 'con
vert infidels', it was a more mundane ambition to become rich.
In 1506 he travelled back to Europe, this time to Rome. We know little
about this episode, which may have had a religious influence upon him.25 He
went back to the New World and experienced what he called a 'conversion'

from mere colonist to man of conscience. In 1511 he heard a sermon by Friar

Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, who famously asked, 'Are
these not men?' regarding the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the
face oftheir brutalization by the Spaniards.26 The sermon moved Las Casas

deeply. Slowly, Las Casas started to think more about the status of the 'In
dians', witness more of their travails, and examine his conscience. Eventu

ally, he renounced his property, land and encomiendas, the slaves and

to him by the Crown.27

In October 1515, he returned to
territory granted
Spain to address Cardinal Cisneros. He propounded his 'Reform of the
Indies'.28 In this Utopian text, written months before Thomas Moore's Uto

pia, he argued for a re-organization of the administration of the Indies. He

was consequently named 'Universal Protector of the Indians'. He professed

22 Ibid.
23
OC, IV, p. 829.
24
The exact date is also uncertain (see OC, I, p. 39).
25
OC, I, p. 45.
26
Ibid., pp. 53^4, 193.
27 Las Casas decried the encomiendas in the harshest terms (Pagden, The Fall of
Natural Man, p. 36).
28
OC,I, p. 81.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 407

theDominican Order in 1523, a process that began with a three-year trial

and made him part of the order until his last days.29

Discovering Difference: On Las Casas' Method

Las Casas first discovered the Amerindian in the spring of 1493. Christopher
Columbus was returning from his first trip to the Americas back to Seville,
and he brought back with him some 'Indians' as human trophies. Las Casas
was nine years old at the time and remembered clearly the sight of the natives
near the 'arco de las Imagenes'.30 His father travelled to the New World the
same year and, upon his return in 1499, brought back a young Amerindian for
the young Bartolomé, as if he were bringing back an exotic pet for his son's
amusement.31
For Las Casas, the discovery of the Americas is quite literally the beginning
of a New World.32 It is a new stage for the entire globe, and it has cultural,
political, religious, social and philosophical importance. It is a break with the
past. Hence, we can say that Las Casas stands at the very inception of moder

nity, not simply in terms of historical time but, in his writings, also in terms of
modern political thought.33 Much ink has been spilt over whether Machiavelli
or Hobbes was the first modern political thinker. Yet Las Casas has been
unjustly neglected. His work, even in the concise Short Account, is a water
shed moment in the move from medieval to modernthought for two
political
main reasons. It is the first time that an entirely new population is confronted
by the modern state, and it is up to Las Casas to find the rhetorical, that is, the
justificatory apparatus to incorporate these new peoples into the Spanish
state.
Indeed, Las Casas stands at the crossroads of the medieval and the modern
world. One of the principal meanings of modernity is newness, and for Las
Casas the Americas represent the entirely new and that which cannot be

grasped with old ways of thinking or seeing. 'Everything that has happened
since the marvelous discovery of the Americas ... has been so extraordinary
that the whole story remains incredible to anyone who has not experienced it
firsthand.'34 The ancient world is no longer of use, for '[the New World]
seems, indeed, to overshadow all the deeds of famous men of the past, no

29
Ibid., p. 157.
30
OC, IV, p. 829.
31
X, p. 296.
OC,
32
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other
See
(Norman, OK, 1999), ch. 1, passim.
33
He is at the theoretical vanguard that engaged in
'transgressing boundaries of dif
ference' (Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. A.B.
Fisher and M.D. O'Hara (Durham, NC, 2009), p. 3).
34
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and
trans. Nigel Griffin (New York, 1992) (hereafter, Short Account),
p. 3.

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408 D. VON VACANO

matter how heroic, and to silence all talk of other wonders of the world' .35 A

new page can be turned in human history, and the fantastic as well as the hor
rific sights of the Americas pose wholly new problems to politics and to
political thought.
In the Short Account, written in 1542, we find a masterpiece of rhetoric36
suffused with moral argumentation couched in emotive, vivid descriptions.37
Las Casas' oeuvre is voluminous, but no other part of it has the argumentative
power of the Brevisima relaciôn de la destruiciôn de las Indias, re-edited in
154638 and finally published in 1552 (without a royal license)39 when Las
Casas was around the age of sixty-seven.40 Much as Machiavelli's The Prince

(written in 1513 and published in 1532), its brevity belies its significance to
the origins of modern political thought. Whereas Machiavelli's most infa
mous work carries a radical new teaching couched in the language of a short
missive of advice to a prince, Las Casas' brief missive to a prince carries a
reversal of standard notions in medieval thought, which coalesced ideas from
ancient political thought and Christian doctrines.41 The Short Account is Las
Casas' chief textual contribution to canonical political thought. This argu
ment is especially cogent if we consider the serious weaknesses of his
Historia de las Indias, as well as the fact that he never tried to publish this
long work of flawed historiography.42
Many readers have dismissed the Short Account throughout the ages by
a work of Humanistic rhetoric. From the
making the mistake of not seeing it as
Friar Motolinia, who accused Las Casas of exaggeration, to the first Flemish
edition of 1578, to the views of Manuel José Quintana, who in 1833 argued that

35
Ibid.
read as rhetoric rather than history, moral philosophy, or a chronicle, debates
36 If

about the accuracy of its claims are made moot, such as those cited in Bartolomé de Las
Casas, Brevisima relation de la destruiciôn de las Indias (Bayamon, Puerto Rico, 2000)
(henceforth Brevisima), pp. 267-70.
37 It was written the same
year that the Nuevas Leyes were promulgated by King
Charles V, regulating the treatment of the 'Indians'. These laws were largely a result of
Las Casas' work on behalf of the natives (OC, I, p. 191). These laws caused widespread
uproar in colonial cities (OC, I, p. 208), and many blamed
Las Casas personally.
38
Brevisima, p. 72.
39
Ibid., p. 126.
40
p. 55.
Ibid,
For the influence of Machiavelli on Spanish Renaissance thinkers, especially on
41

Furio Ceriol, see Fernândez-Santamarîa, The State, War, and Peace, pp. 250, 211.
critique of Las Casas' Historia de las Indias, in Bartolomé de
42 See Lewis Hanke's

Las An Interpretation of his Life and Writings (The Hague, 1951). Also the fact
Casas:
that Las Casas never sought to publish it. In fact, he asked his colleagues at the Colegio de
San Gregorio not to publish it for at least forty years (OC, I, pp. 298-9). Contra Castro's
belief that 'the Brevisima is little more than a synoptic version of his Historia de Indias',
Castro, Another Face of Empire, p. 109.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 409

the Short Account was unnecessary because it was fraught with 'falsehoods',43
readers have tried to compare wrote to the 'reality'
what Las of what
Casas

actually happened during the Spanish conquest of the Americas. But the Short
Account is first and foremost a work of Renaissance rhetoric. Las Casas fol
lowed all the core conventions of rhetoric when composing, revising and

re-editing this text.

Humanism in the Renaissance meant the study of human affairs

(Humanitates). It entailed five different elements. These were Grammar (that

is, Latin), Poetry, History, Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric. They were meant
to educate a man to be able to persuade: to be able to use practical reason usu

ally either in law courts or the church.44 In fields where proofs could not easily
be given, that is, the non-logical disciplines, rhetoric was essential in the
exposition of arguments. Rhetoric requires the latching on of pathos to logos,
or emotions to ideas. Ethos, or showing the competence of the author, is also

necessary. Central to effective rhetoric, as Quintilian posited, is the vividness

of descriptions. One has to 'see' what the author writes about.
Las Casas' is, in this light, a paragon
Short Account of humanist rhetoric.45
The subject is one that deals both with the juridical and religious status of
beings (the Amerindians), but is something that eludes facile proof because of
alternative explanations given by others who tried to argue that the Amer
indians were not fully human.46 Las Casas thus opts for non-strictly-logical
reasoning, combining the emotional force of his descriptions of what he saw
with an argument for the distinctive humanity of the Amerindians. Having
witnessed events in the New World, Las Casas is able also to provide ethos.
Above all, his writing is pre-eminently vivid; it has an aesthetic rationality
that allows the reader to practically 'see' the events that he describes and to
draw moral conclusions from them.
To grasp the methodology of Las Casas' text, it is instructive to compare it
to the first modern political tract: Machiavelli' s Prince. The Short Account is,
indirectly, an anti-Prince.47 They are both, essentially, letters to rulers. The
Dominican friar denounces the practices of his prince, just as Machiavelli did,
but for the purpose of establishing a new morality rather than to subvert the

43
Brevisima, p. 541.
44
Evangelization is a persuasive project in the realm of words and language (see Don
Paul Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World (Columbia, SC, 1996)), p. 2).
45 Hanke
recognizes that the Short Account 'establishes Las Casas as a polemical
writer, not a historian', Hanke, Las Casas: An Interpretation, p. 59.
46 See
Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World, p. 4.
47
The most evident passage of this is when Las Casas states, against the
colloquial
Machiavellism, that 'one must never use evil means to reach a end, even if those good
ends bring goodness'. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed.
Agustin
Millares Carlo (Mexico City, 1981) (hereafter HDI), Vol. I, Ch XCIV, p. 382.

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410 D. VON VACANO

politics-morality relationship as the Florentine did.48 Throughout his short

book, Machiavelli feigns genuflection to Christian ideas, but in fact he pro
poses all manner of inhumanity and immorality in the service of political
expediency.49 Politics is autonomous, and morality is tangential to it. That
was his teaching, embodied in the person of Cesare Borgia, a brutal man of
Spanish origins who was made Bishop of Pamplona at the age of fifteen.50 But
for Las Casas the key issue of his time was not the political inefficacy of the
rulers of his motherland, it was the moral crisis of the Spanish Crown caused
by the atrocities it perpetrated in the New World.
Whereas Machiavelli's masterwork of rhetoric, The Prince, closes with a
poetic denunciation of imperialism in the form of an exhortation to liberate
Italy from the foreign 'barbarians' (the French and the Spanish), Las Casas'
short text is an imperialist defence of Spain's presence in the Americas, but is
equally fervent against the 'barbarians'. This time, however, the barbarians
are not the native 'savages', but the very same Spanish troops which also
occupy the Americas in the name of civilization. Machiavelli's chief work
argued for the appearance of a single man who would be able to overturn the
woes of Florence; this man would be modelled on Borgia or perhaps Machia
velli himself. In the case of Las Casas, a fundamental transformation in the
way that the conquest is seen — which may require one man to tear off the
scales from the — is demanded. Las Casas is the who
Emperor's eyes person
takes it upon himself to carry out this task.
The text is organized as a geographical survey of the Americas, from His
paniola (the current Dominican Republic) all the way down to Cuzco in Peru,
carried out by recounting the atrocities committed by the Spanish.51 The work

is rife with rhetorical exaggeration. The peoples of the Americas are humble,
gentle, peace-loving and docile, as Las Casas portrays them.52 On the one
hand, this creates an image of innocence that suits his argument that the
natives are near-saints, while the Spaniards are devilish. On the other hand, it
treats the Amerindians as child-like, perhaps mentally challenged, and at any

thought is an alternative to Machiavellianism (see Fernândez

48 Much as Vitoria's

Santamaria, The State, War, and Peace, p. 103).

49
Some, such as Giménez Fernândez, argue that Las Casas sought the readership of
the prince in subterfuge in order that his book would receive official imprimatur and be
taken to the New World by Spanish soldiers (see OC, I, p. 284). Friar Motolinia believed
the book was intended so that copies would be shipped to the New World by Las Casas
(see Brevisima, p. 126).
50 His
Spanish surname was Boija.
51
See Brevisima, pp. 315-16.
52 Docile like 'lambs to the slaughter' (Short Account, p. 60).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 411

rate not possessing the intellectual level of adults. But the chief aim here is to
persuade the King of Spain to put a stop to the evil acts of his soldiers.53
If the Short is to stand at the centre of Las Casas'
Account contribution to
the canon of thought, then we can interpret the rest of his work as
political
supporting the arguments of this brief text.54 In the history of political
thought, we must pay attention to the coherence and effectiveness of particu
lar books. Great political thinkers must also be good writers. We cannot simp
ly take into account the entirety of someone's opus if it does not have
coherence or is not readable as texts. This is what makes the Short Account a

historically-important text: it is powerful, well-argued, original and readable.

The significance of the Apologética Historia becomes secondary; it is the
description of the discovery of difference, of how Las Casas appreciates and
values the culture and land of the Amerindians. It presages modern concerns
with anthropological questions.55 Its two-hundred and sixty-seven articles
make for a very precise and extended encyclopedic perspective on the Amer
indian cultures.56 But even beneath its apparent objectivity, we can feel the
interested 'passion por indis that palpitates in each page'.57
In discovering the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Las
Casas also makes a critical step for political thought. His focus on the very
possibility that the natives were human stands in sharp contrast to earlier
preoccupations. In broad strokes, 'from a comparative perspective, we could
note that the Greek philosopher . . . was concerned with physics and meta

physics'58 whereas
modern thought is about humanity. In between, medieval
is
political thought largely concerned with God. Thus, the turn towards man,
Renaissance humanism, is central to the advent of modernity. Las Casas is
part of Renaissance humanism, but his focus is not man's inherent amorality
or the autonomy of politics as in the case of Machiavelli. It is human differ
ence, understood as the contrast between diverse human groups. This contrast
tested the very idea of what it is to be human and was the locus of the birth of
race.

53
Las Casas tells us that he wrote it so that 'his Highness could read it with
greater
comfort' (OC, I, p. 284; see also Brevisima, p. 117).
54
Written texts have a certain power that unwritten stories do not. Witness the
per
manence of the Bible.
55
OC, I. p. 305.
56
Culturalist interpretations of the oeuvre of Las Casas, that is, those which seek to
underscore the proto-anthropological contributions of the Dominican priest, do not
fully
articulate what 'culture' and 'cultural groups' as well as 'race' are per se (see
Pagden,
Fall of Natural Man, introduction).
57
OC, I, p. 306.
58
Ibid., p. 386.

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412 D. VON VACANO

Persuading the Barbarian: The Rhetoric of Nascent Racialization

Reading Las Casas' oeuvre in light of his brief Short Account of the Destruc
tion of the Indies, we find that, while he was an early-modern ethnographer,
anthropologist, jurist or historiographer, these contributions are outweighed
by his legacy as a rhetorician of Empire. The Apologética Historia itself is
marred by sundry flaws that make it less than convincing, either on purely
ethnographic grounds or on the grounds of Scholastic theology.59 The Short
Account allows us to observe that Las Casas' chief aim was to persuade those

with power to try to curb the cruelties in the Americas, so that the Christian
faith could be adequately expanded in the New World.60 In this light, even the
Apologética Historia is rhetorical in nature. As Menéndez Pidal argues, the
Apologética is 'an extreme exaggeration of the virtues of the Indians, to the
point of being incredible'.61
Why can we say that Las Casas stands at the origin of the genealogy of
racialization? Principally because the notion of 'ethnicity' does not ade
quately cover the totality of the phenomenon that the idea of 'race' refers to,
and Las Casas is a pivotal figure in the moment when human cultural differ
ence became transformed into discussions about human difference per se.
There is no doubt that ethnicity is central to the definition of race. But race is a
socially constructed notion that refers to categorically distinctive kinds of
human beings even across ethnicities. Las Casas was not merely trying to
show that different cultural groups things similarly
do in many respects. His

understanding of the Amerindians be termed proto-racialist

can because he

treats them as essentially different from Europeans, but still within the human
race and not necessarily inferior (hence he is a racialist, not a racist).
Las Casas speaks of 'the Indians' as if they all shared fundamentally dis

tinctive characteristics, both psychologically and physically. A native of

Florida, to Las Casas, is as benevolent and less-than-robust as one
according
in Guatemala or Peru.62 One from Hispaniola can be compared to one from
Upper Peru.63 Las Casas thinks synthetically here. He seeks to comprehend
diverse human populations under one single racial rubric. This is not entirely
cogent. Imagine for a second that someone were to say something similar
about 'native Europeans'. That a native from central Germany is as thrifty,

Moreover, it was written for a wide audience, not as a precise tract (see Pagden,
59

Fall of Natural Man, p. 120).

60
Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World, p. 61.
61
See OC, I, p. 303. Menéndez Pelayo agrees with this assessment. Even its admirers
call it a work of 'ideology' (ibid., p. 304).
62 In
1537, Las Casas visited Guatemala. He was in Peru in 1581 (see OC, I, pp. 177,
352).
63 It is Council of the Indies, Las Casas uses the Caribbean
telling that in a letter to the
Tainoterm bohio (meaning hut) in the very different linguistic and cultural context of
Charcas and the city of La Paz, in present-day Bolivia (OC, XIII, Ch. LII, p. 349).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 413

let's say, as a native from Southern Spain or a Greek, or a Sicilian, a Roma

nian or a Scot. This sort of reasoning is no longer 'ethnographic'. It makes cat
egorical claims about a large, transnational group of people.64 This sort of
formulation is the root of racialization, which then grows into a more fully

fledged version as politics, aestheticization, and other processes get tied to it.
The seeds are in the ancient world (the distinctions between 'us' and 'them',
or the 'civilized' and the 'barbarian'), but the roots are in the early modern
period, specifically in the works of Las Casas.
It is in the course of his debates with intellectual opponents that Las Casas
came to argue for a proto-racialized understanding of the characteristics of the
natives. Chief among these opponents was Juan Ginés de Sepdlveda, whom
Las Casas 'debated' in 1550—51,65 In this encounter between the two eminent

figures, we find that Las Casas developed his views in relation to those of his
adversaries.66 They did not emerge sui generis. Thus, the ideas of Sepulveda
are important in understanding what Las Casas was up to.67

In the spring of 1547 Las Casas had a full agenda: he travelled to Arande de
Duero in Spain to provide an account to the Council of the Indies, renounce
the Chiapas bishopric, find a new home, recruit missionaries to travel to
Guatemala, and debate Juan Ginés de Sepdlveda on the status of the Amer
indians.68 Las Casas heard that Sepulveda was seeking a license to publish a
new book to be called Démocrates his first book
secundus,69 a continuation of

by the name Démocrates primus™ The first book was about the legitimacy of
the Spanish Emperor's wars in Europe; the second was on the legitimacy of
the 'Indian wars' in the New World. Much like Las Casas, Sepulveda was a

64
As Roberto Levillier writes, Las Casas did not generally spend much time distin
guishing between the Tekestas and Τahinos of Cuba, the cannibalistic Caribs, the Otomi,
Jivaros, Uros, Maya, Chibcha, Collas, Aztecs, Chiriguanes, Diaguitas, Araucanians,
Juri, Iule, Comechingon, Aymara, Quechua or Guarani peoples. See Lewis Hanke, The
Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Dallas, 2002), p. 128.
65
Fernândez-Santamarfa provides extensive analyses of Sepulveda's thought, but
practically nothing on Las Casas (see Fernândez-Santamarfa, The State, War, and Peace,
pp. 201, 206, 220).
66 One motivation for Las Casas
publishing the Short Account in 1552 was the fact
that Sepiilveda published his Apologia in Rome in 1550, which Las Casas wanted to
counter (Brevisima, p. 113).
67
Antonio Mosquera Aguilar makes the insightful claim that Sepiilveda laid the
intellectual bases of racism, thus locating him at the antipode of Las Casas' construction
of the idea of race in a non-racist way. Antonio Mosquera Aguilar, El Pensamiento
Lascasiano en el Pensamiento Latinoamericano y de Europa (San Cristobal de Las Casa,
1994), pp. 69-81, passim.
68
OC, I, p. 261.
69
'An exercise', as well, 'in the persuasive art of eloquence' (Pagden, Fall ofNatural
Man, p. 112). See Fernândez-Santamarfa, The State, War, and Peace, pp. 220-30.
70 Which was anti-Erasmian and
(importantly) anti-Machiavellian (Fernândez
Santamarfa, The State, War, and Peace, p. 187).

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414 D. VON VACANO

rhetorician. He was not trained as a theologian, and for this he was derided in
various quarters. He was a man of letters, a literary figure whose works aimed
to achieve artistic value as well as to persuade readers.

The dispute started in halls: not those of academia, since neither of them
was a scholar; nor those of power, since neither had a political role. But it

ignited in religious hallways, pitting the humanistic Sepûlveda against the

learned and impassioned Las Casas. A man from Seville against a man from
Cordoba engaged in an intellectual mano a mano. The argument had two

phases. The first was the effort by Las Casas to prevent the publication of the
manuscript. The second was an actual discussion of the various arguments

presented by each person. It was not a simultaneous debate but it did have the
drama of a world-historical moment.
Las Casas admired Sepûlveda's style. His Latin was very 'polished and
elegant', and he followed strict rules of rhetoric.71 Las Casas wanted to dis
pute Sepulveda's two principal theses: that the Spanish wars in the 'Indies'
were morally legitimate, and that the Amerindians were obligated to submit
themselves to the power of the Crown. Sepulveda asked for permission to
publish the text, but the Council of the Indies rejected it, believing it would
cause a furor. Eventually, through friends, Sepûlveda acquired a license to
print his work. The text was then sent to the universities at Salamanca and

Alcalâ to be examined. Theologians and experts in jurisprudence gave their

verdict: it should not be published. Sepulveda persisted, wrote a summary of

the work, and sent it to a friend in Rome, under the title of Apologia. It appears
Las Casas never actually read the text of Démocrates secundus. Still, the King
of Spain deemed the issue sufficiently worthy to call for a discussion in
Valladolid to determine the validity of Sepulveda's claims regarding Spain's
presence in the Indies.

When the debate took place, Sepulveda orator, he

spoke first. A master
for three hours reading.without not present.
Las The next
Casas was
spoke
day Las Casas' turn came, and for five straight days he read his long work
summarizing what the Spanish had done in the Americas, the Apologia. The
stunned audience asked Domingo de Soto to summarize the two depositions.
De Soto made clear that the two accounts were quite different in form and
it
substance. Nonetheless, both were presented to the Council in a forensic man
ner, for the purpose of convincing the audience of their respective perspec
tives. In May 1551, the Council held a session that did not proclaim a victor in
this debate, but simply granted the value of each perspective. Two Dominican
of the junta recused while de Soto
priests who were members themselves,

sided with Las Casas and friar Bernardino de Arévalo supported Sepulveda.
In effect, Las Casas and Sepûlveda acted not objectively or dispassionately,

71 OC, I, 263.
p.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 415

but by trying to blow the wind in their own direction.72 Where both saw
the latter
alterity, the former saw it through the idea of an equal moral status;
through the dichotomy of superiority/inferiority.73
Through this dispute with Sepulveda, we discern Las Casas' enterprise as a
whole as a fundamentally rhetorical one. He was never trained as a theologian
like Vitoria,74 nor as a scientist or explorer.75 Neither was he educated as a

historian.76 His allegiance was to the Catholic Church,77 and his method was
the persuasive use of language. Addressing himself to Prince Philip, Las
Casas opens the Short Account with a prologue reminiscent of Machiavelli's

Dedicatory Letter to Lorenzo de Medici in The Prince. This Renaissance con

vention is important here because it tells us that the work is not a simple his
torical treatise, or a personal eyewitness account, or a moral diatribe. It is a
political work, intended to persuade the Prince of Spain. In the very first sen
tence he tells us that his concern in this text is the very notion, however
nascent, of race: 'divine Providence has ordained that the world shall, for the
benefit and proper government of the human race [linaje],n be divided into
kingdoms and peoples and that these shall be ruled by kings'.79

The Short Account as Las Casas' Central Teaching

Drenched in blood, the pages of the Short Account tell amazing stories that
leave even jaded twenty-first century readers aghast. The violence of the
conquest is so trenchant that Las Casas himself seems to be at a loss for words
to describe the atrocities. The Short Account follows rhetorical conventions

very faithfully. Above all, the graphic descriptions of massacres, beheadings

and dogs eating human flesh make for vivid, visually-stimulating reading.
The Short Account is also characterized by the use of exaggeration, something
essential to rhetoric. Historians have long disputed the numbers that Las
Casas uses for the scale of the crimes against humanity that he describes. Las
Casas also uses the technique of repetition: he reiterates the same sort of

72
Ibid., p. 266.
73
Todorov, The Conquest of America, p. 160.
74
It is correct to state that '[n]o one provided as much clarity to the theological prob
lems of the New World as Vitoria' (OC, I, p. 268). Las Casas makes mention of Vitoria
on one page of the Apologia. See also OC, I, p. 273, on the fact that Las Casas never
attended any university.
75
The Short Account is 'quite inferior' as a work of 'science' (Queralto, OC, I,
p. 288).
76
According to Hanke, even his more cogent historiographie work, the Historia de
las Indias, is badly organized and its narrative is haphazard, without order, and circuitous
(see OC, I, p. 298).
77
Hence his principal obligation was 'evangelization' (OC, I, pp. 308, 316).
78
Brevisima, p. 379. The term 'linaje' reappears (Brevisima, pp. 384-5).
79
Short Account, p. 5.

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416 D. VON VACANO

gory stories over and over, and uses the same terms, such as 'barbarian' to
describe the Spaniards' actions throughout the book. Moreover, much of what
he says may have been made up; this rhetorical technique is acceptable for
persuasive speeches, but certainly not for ethnographic writing. Lastly, the
Short Account manipulates the emotions of the reader. One is compelled to
feel compassion for the natives, given the cruelties and sins of the Spaniards.
Before addressing the specifics of the text of the Short Account, we must
make some observations on the Apologética Historia. The privileging of this
text over the Short Account has led some commentators to posit both that Las
Casas was seeking to catalogue cultural differences and to utilize a systematic
'Aristotelian-Thomist conceptual scheme'.80 But unlike an objective anthro
of
pological catalogue particular differences, the Apologética Historia of Las
Casas employs inventive juxtapositions of Amerindian and ancient European
cultures without any empirical basis.81 As Pagden himself notes, the reader is
'left to "read off' the similarities, or dissimilarities, by himself'.82 This
betrays a fundamental lack of scientific method in this work. At the same
time, Las Casas abandons the Aristotelian distinction between civilized and
barbarian peoples when convenient, and in fact generally claims that the term
'barbarian' applies better to the Spaniards. For these reasons, it is not possible
to take the Apologética Historia as an objective tract. We must look elsewhere
to see the basic nature of Las Casas' project.
Hence, we must go back to the Short Account.83 It is in this text that his
trans valuation of values is most evident. It is here that he inverts the subject of
the civilized-barbarian dichotomy most clearly. One of the salient rhetorical
aspects of the Short Account is Las Casas' use of aesthetic representation.84 In
a few instances of the text, Las Casas also refers to beauty regarding the
natives' form. He calls them 'handsome and easy on the eye'85 to justify their
human value.86 From Hispaniola to Florida to the River Plate, the Indians'

80 See
Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 122.
81 'To call Bartolomé de Las Casas an anthropologist may seem to some not only
inaccurate but presumptuous as well' (Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice, p. 61).
Recall that Las Casas did not speak Amerindian indigenous languages at all.
82
Pagden. Fall of Natural Man, p. 122.
83 Just as Leo Strauss
argues that Machiavelli's principal teaching lies at the centre of
his brief and infamous text, I posit that the core of Las Casas' ideas are in his most
well-known work.
84 Columbus himself notes the Indians'
beauty in his diary of the first voyage to the
Americas. 'They all walk naked... even the women ... with beautiful bodies and pretty
faces ... and have thick hair' (Archivos de la Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS 10255),
p. 15.
85
Short Account, pp. 21, 103, 105. The Spanish original is 'lindeza y hermosura'
{Brevisima, pp. 400-1), which means 'prettiness and beauty'. He also calls them 'muy
bien dispuestas' (Brevisima, pp. 494-5, 498-9).
86 The Amerindians
possess 'physical beauty' (OC, I, p. 310).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 417

beauty strikes Las Casas, and he believes this is important to note as some
thing that perhaps points to God's plan in making the natives attractive.87 As
he tells us elsewhere, 'The native peoples of these Indies are ... by reason of
the good composition of their bodily parts, the harmony (convivenciaf8 and
proportion of their exterior sense organs, the beauty of their faces or gestures
and their whole vultu (face), the shape of their heads, their manners and move
ments, etc., naturally of good reason and good understanding.'89 The opposite
of someone who appreciates beauty or lacks sensory perception is someone
who is 'anaesthetized',90 a term that Las Casas uses also to mean those who
are morally blind owing to their lack of compassion and emotion in the face of
cruelties.91
Beyond these glimpses of aesthetic categories to make evident some char
acteristics of the natives, Las Casas' cardinal rhetorical method is the subver
sion of the meaning of certain words. Chief among them, as mentioned above,
in the Short Account, is the term 'barbarian'. Far from engaging in a logical
rational Scholastic analysis of the distinctive meanings of the term, Las Casas
in the Short Account simply wants to generate a moral and lexical reversal of
the predominant meaning of the term. The main meaning for him is the bar
barian as a perpetrator of atrocities and brutality. The predominant meaning
of the term in his time was the barbarian as a non-Christian.92 In his rhetorical
method, he seeks to portray the natives as categorically distinct from the
Spaniards in that they are not barbarians, but generally simply the victims of
atrocities, with very few instances where they rebel or resist. In other words,
they have a nearly superhuman capacity to withstand immense suffering, not
to cause it as barbarians do. In the Short Account, there is no complex philo
sophical argument regarding this term.93
Throughout,there is a rhetorical re-articulation of the term in order to shift
the prevailing categories of 'barbarian-civilized'.94 But this is not merely for

87
'[El] color, hermosura de los indios' (OC, III, p. 551).
88
Columbus describes the harmony or 'friendship' of the Cuban Indians (Archivos
de la Biblioteca National, Madrid, MS 10255), entry of 1 November 1492. He goes on to
say that they possess no evil (entry of 5 November 1492).
89
Apologética Historia Sumaria, in Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 46.
90
'insensibles' (Brevisima, p. 75).
91
Short Account, p. 3.
92
Las Casas grants that the Amerindians are barbarians in this sense; they are
non-Christians and hence barbarous (Las Casas, Apologética Historia Sumaria (Madrid,
1876), ch. 267; and Epilogue, OC, 8, pp. 1587-92).
93
Las Casas' transvaluation of the values 'civilized' and 'barbarian' is similar to
Machiavelli's transvaluation of the term virtù. They both reject the existing
meaning
assigned to those values and posit their own, going back to older definitions (pagan for
Machiavelli and biblical for Las Casas).
94
The trope associating Amerindians to barbarism and Europeans to civilization,
however, remained alive well up to the nineteenth century in the works of Sarmiento and

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418 D. VON VACANO

the purposes of description.Las Casas is intent on showing a profound, essen

tial distinction between the two kinds of men. The Spaniards are 'inhuman
and unjust barbarians'.95 Here, Las Casas wants to make the claim that at stake
is not the idea of how different cultures can be seen as similar in some way;
rather, it is about the categorical definitions of what counts as human. The

Spaniards are like lions or tigers or wolves,96 in other words they are humans
of a different kind than the pacific, lamb-like natives. The use of animal simi
les and metaphors underscore the fact that the debate that Las Casas was

engaged in was not culturalist, but rather an effort to prove the very
merely
humanity of the Indians.97 Their membership of the human race as such is
what was debated at the time, something that overrides issues of cross

cultural understanding. Time and again, Las Casas repeats the terms barbarian
and its cognates to show that human beings can be of two different sorts: bru
tal or pacific.98 Clearly Las Casas knows that the Spaniards are members of

the human race and is not trying to persuade anyone of the opposite. But he

does know that many of his opponents do not consider the natives human, and
his rhetorical skills are put to use to show that they are humane and indeed part
of the human race.

The Importance of the Sentience of Amerindians

While much of Las Casas' accomplishment lies in providing an internal cri

tique of the Aristotelian model of 'barbarism' and 'natural slavery' (using the
very principle of reason that the Philosopher held as the key touchstone of
what makes someone human) in effect his chief contribution in showing the
humanity of the Amerindians is in his ability to convey the capacity for sen
tience of the natives." Las Casas often misconstrued and misinterpreted both

Aristotle and Aquinas.100 For this reason, his efforts in scholastic philosophy
are undermined. He does not achieve the level of logical rigour that we find in
Vitoria. Las Casas is indeed a great thinker, but his contribution lies in a dif
ferent field from that of Scholastic logic: that of humanistic historiography
that is rhetorical in nature. Specifically, his demonstration of the

the Bolivian thinker Alcides Arguedas (see The Sick People, in Nineteenth-Century
Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition, ed. Janet Burke and Ted
Humphrey (Indianapolis, 2007), p. 354).
95
Short Account, p. 56, my italics.
96 Las Casas added this simile in his revision of the text in 1546 and modified it for the

1552 edition (Brevisima, pp. 76, 80).

97 See
Brevisima, pp. 522-3.
98 Short Account, pp. 108, 110, 114.
99 In this
sense, Las Casas did not have a literal reading of Aristotle (contra Pagden,
Fall of Natural Man, p. 123).
'In Las Casas's work, the reading of Aristotle and Thomas [is sometimes] wildly
100

inaccurate' (Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 122).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 419

Amerindians' capacity to feel (pain, as well as other emotions) in a way simi

lar to that of European human beings, is the crux of his effort to show the
natives as
part of the human 'race'
(linaje).101
To be sure, animals also do have sentience. But in the Short Account, Las
Casas attempts to provide evidence of the specifically human sentience of the
natives. This variety lies in the self-awareness, or consciousness, of the experi
ence of feeling and emotion. Whereas animals suffer pain simpliciter, human
beings are cognizant of it. Moreover, this awareness leads the human being to
reason about the nature, causes and meaning of pain and suffering. In this
manner, a particular emotion, pain, leads to intellectual activity in the human
being, something wholly lacking in the non-human species. The realization,
in turn, leads to moral judgments. Thus, emotion is essential to the develop
ment of moral sentiments.102
At the very inception of the Short Account, Las Casas tells us what is cen
tral to his story. The Europeans, specifically the Spaniards, had 'become so
anaesthetized to human suffering by their own greed and ambition that they
had ceased to be men in any meaningful sense of the term'.103 To become
anaesthetized is to lose all feeling, all capacity of sentience, which for Las
Casas is cardinal in allowing morality to function. Aesthetic experience,
understood here as sensory cognition based on feelings, is thus not merely a

capacity to witness something, but to be moved in a way that will connect a

person to others' suffering and their condition as humans. Thus, there cannot
be morality without emotion preceding it. Morals remain abstract and inert
without feeling. Moreover, Las Casas goes so far as to say that this is
quintessentially human', without it, we become degenerate and inhuman.
His moral philosophy leads Las Casas to one of the main
of the arguments
Short Account: fear and terror cannot be justified morally or politically. Writ
ing as if he were debating Machiavelli, who believed a successful political
man must be able to engage in cruelty well used, Las Casas the idea
opposes
of staging sanguinary massacres in public. Praise of the sort that Machiavelli
reserves for Cesare Borgia's display of Remirro de Oreo's butchered body on
a piazza is nowhere to be found in the Short Account. Both Machiavelli and
Las Casas face a new world and a new politics, but for Las Casas cruelty can
not be sustained as a matter of policy; it is neither moral nor expedient. Las
Casas also believes that there is an implicit link between ancient cruelty and

101
This is different from merely showing that different cultural groups have similari
ties, which is what Pagden argues Las Casas was attempting (Pagden, Fall of Natural
Man, p. 122).
102
Herder recognized Las Casas' ability to promote the equality of Amerindians
without turning to relativism. 'The best historians and
anthropologists are driven by
moral passion' (Michael Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy (New York, 2010),
p. 161).
103
Short Account, p. 3. ('insensibles', Brevisima, p. 375).

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420 D. VON VACANO

the brutalities of modern Spain. With rhetorical force, Las Casas tells us of a
poem to compare the current Spanish decadence with that of ancient Rome:

Nero watched from Tarpey's height

The flames engulf Rome's awesome might;
Children and ancients shout in pain,
He all regards with cold disdain104

In other words, we must dispense with the old, and look for new ways of
thinking if we are to solve our current problems.
What distinguishes the moderns from the ancients, for Las Casas, is the
ability to renounce terror and fear as political methods through Christianity.105
By referring to Nero, Las Casas calls into question the Roman Empire's pagan
foundations, which were unable to prevent Rome's self-immolation. Terror
can only be
experienced through the fear that one or herself may
himself

experience pain and suffering. Thus, human sentience is at the heart of what
makes political subjects out of a people. If a newly-found group of people is
discovered to be as sentient and as cognizant of suffering as the people with
power, then we are morally obligated to treat them as equals. Hence, the
blood-soaked pages of the Short Account repeat the refrain that torture is
unacceptable. It is inhuman because it violates a fundamental element of what
makes us human. Las Casas repeats this theme over and over, much more so
than the idea that the Indians are rational. It is for this reason that the central
idea in this pivotal text is the salience of conscious sentience, not the central
ity of reason, as what makes someone human. Compassion, or the ability to
sympathize with another person's feelings, must be the cornerstone of a just

political system. Las Casas recognizes that the natives look and act differently
from the Spaniards, but that does not shock him. What stuns him is the lack of
compassion that the Spanish soldiers display in the face of the massive suffer
ing that is evident in the faces of fellow members of the human race.106

Who are the real Barbarians? Writing against the Ancients

One of the principal ways that many Spaniards assigned an inferior moral sta
tus to the indigenous peoples of the Americas was by pointing out some of the
'inhumane' practices they performed, such as human sacrifice, infanticide
and even cannibalism.107 Anthropophagy was the ultimate proof, for many
Europeans, that the beings that existed in the New World were in fact

104
Short Account, p. 47.
In the Historia Apologética, Las Casas denounces the 'ill effects of Sadness and
105

Fear' (see Hanke, Las Casas: An Interpretation, p. 71).

106 Short
Account, pp. 80,92,126. Las Casas writes 'compasiôn del humano linaje'

(.Brevisima, pp. 466-7).

Pagden states, 'barbarism' was defined by the Greeks in terms of behaviour
107 As

and practices, based on what people did (See Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 18).

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 421

subhuman or other-than-human.108 One of the central contributions of Las

Casas' work, particularly in the Short Account, was the overturning of this
trope.109 What distinguished Las Casas as a person from many of his contem
poraries the fact that he actually
was went to and lived in the Americas. In this
manner he was able to witness firsthand not only the autochthonous living
conditions but also the dying conditions of the natives at the hands of the
Spaniards. It is this experience that led Las Casas to place great emphasis on
the sentience of the Amerindians in his effort to show their membership of the
human race. Las Casas was quite orthodox in his theology,110 but his applica
tion of Catholic morality was the opposite of the norm of his time.
The suffering perpetrated by the Spaniards, in Las Casas' account, was
nothing less than a form of anthropophagy. To be sure, the Spaniards did not
practise literal cannibalism on a wide scale, but the consumption of human
flesh in the process of domination and conquest of the Americas was, in Las
Casas' view, morally more opprobrious than the infrequent cannibalism of a
few groups found among the natives. In the friar's rhetorical descriptions, the
natives were in fact generally living in a sort of Garden of Eden environment
at the time of the Spanish arrival. The Amerindians were close to Biblical
innocence before the Fall, the Serpent being the Spanish forces that led to
exile from Paradise.111
If indeed there was cannibalism among the natives, Las Casas wants to per
suade us that much of it was by the Spanish.
caused In some cases it could
even be justified, owing to the brutalities committed by the Europeans.112 Las
Casas thus wants to argue that Amerindian cannibalism was in fact not the
fault of the natives, but was a product of Spanish oppression. In Nicaragua,
Las Casas tells us that '[t]he Christians seized all the maize the locals had
grown themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty
or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own
children and eating them'.113 Further, the Spanish hardly ever fed the Indian

captives, which led the natives to make 'human abbatoir[s]'114 where human
hands and feet were cut off in order to be eaten. In this manner, Las Casas

108
See OC, I, p. 306, on the fact that many of Las Casas' contemporaries viewed the
Amerindians as 'subhuman'.
109
This is in spite of the possibility that he himself believed the natives did
engage in
cannibalism. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 83.
110
Ibid., p. 40.
111
See OC, I, p. 303.
112
Las also argues that cannibalism was quite pervasive in the ancient world.
Casas
The Greeks, Africans, Thracians, Scythians, those of Rhodes, Athens, Egypt, Phoenicia,
Libya and Syria, all committed human sacrifices according to Eusebius of Caesarea as
quoted by Las Casas (Apologetica Historia Ssumaria (Madrid, 1876), ch. 162, p. 1128).
113
Short Account, p. 39. Las Casas' experience in Nicaragua and his fascination with
its natural beauty are recounted in OC, I, p. 167.
114
Short Account, pp. 63, 125.

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422 D. VON VACANO

overturns the recurrent accusation against the natives that they were anthropo
phagie savages. If they did eat human flesh, he says it was a situation in extre
mis caused by the Spanish brutality. Hence the natives are not infra-human.
Are the natives savages, as they are portrayed by many Spaniards? Las
Casas begs to differ, and ignores the facts that the Maya were decimated by
internecine wars, the Aztecs practised human sacrifice, and the Incas were a

powerful military empire.115 Las Casas focuses on the image of the small vil
lage in the tropics, where peaceful, weak, poor, non-materialistic natives

dwell, uninterested worldly in

power.116 argues that they are
But Las Casas

intelligent, hence potentially able to understand and accept the Christian

faith.117 This contradiction between their child-like nature and their purported
intelligence is overlooked by the friar. For his eyes it is more important to
underscore the claim that the three million inhabitants of Hispaniola were
annihilated to about two hundred.
Hispaniola was the first of the areas to be devastated by the effects of Span
ish sins. The 'base appetites' of the Spaniards led to rapes, including that of
the wife of Chief Guarionex.118 Here begins the trope of sexual incontinence,
of lust as a sin that drove the conquistadores to violate the women of the

New World.119 This lust leads to murder, another sin: heads are cut off, people
disemboweled, suckling infants ripped apart, children thrown against rocks,
human beings are grilled over fire coals, and dogs are used to tear apart the
survivors. This scene seems to be nothing less than a depiction of Hell. In

other words, whether Las Casas' account is true or not, it delineates an image

of hellish practices that equate the Spanish with barbaric, profoundly immoral
behaviour.120 It is hence impossible, if one believes his story, to equate the
conquerors with the purveyors of civilization. For this reason, I would argue,
Las Casas decided to use the terms 'Spanish' and 'Christian' as synonymous

in many passages of the final edition of 1552.121 Thus, we can understand that

115 In reference to
Yucatan, Las Casas argues wishfully that the natives were free
from 'sin and vice' (Short Account, p. 71). Las Casas also tries to minimize the Mexica's
acts of human sacrifice (Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 90).
116 Short
Account, p. 86.
interesting to note that, according to Quentin Skinner, Thomas Hobbes in his
117 It is

De Ct've (1642) offers a late-Renaissance view that American Indians represent the anar
chy, fear and insecurity of 'Liberty', as opposed to the peace and order of 'Imperium'.
Las Casas argues that the Amerindians in fact represent good, peaceful subjects of
Empire (Quentin Skinner, Princeton University Lecture, 20 November 2008).
118 Short
Account, p. 13.
119 See
ibid., p. 63.
120 Las Casas calls slavery 'Hell' (ibid., pp. 60, 72, 99). 'Infernal servidumbre'
(Brevisima, pp. 444-5). Las Casas believes all 'Indians' in the Americas had been
enslaved 'Este es un tratado ... sobre la materia de los indios que se han
unjustly (see
hecho esclavos', OC, 10, p. 221).
121 See
Brevisima, pp. 82, 335.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 423

he was not merely making a 'culturalist' critique of a given nationality

(Spain), but seeking to make a fundamental critique of prevailing Catholic
morality, which saw Europeans as ipso facto civilized and moral vis-à-vis
other peoples. In this sense, he moves us away from medieval doctrine and
makes the first step towards a modernist critique of existing religious author
ities and doctrines.
Las Casas' imaginary journey throughout the Americas continues, and the
main teaching is that there is one single human race, which nonetheless has
been ravaged owing to the fact that the Spaniards do not understand that the
inhabitants are members of the same species as the Europeans.122 Las Casas'
task is to insist on the humanity of the natives in spite of external differ
ences.123 From Puerto Rico and Jamaica, Las Casas takes us on an infernal
road trip. In Northern South America, he tells us that the Amerindians were
faced with the requerimiento, an ultimatum to convert or face war, read
entirely in Spanish to native populations who had never even heard of Spain.
Las Casas understands the concept of 'nation' as intimately tied to the idea
of 'race' (linaje). A nation in the Americas is a group of people with sover
eignty over a land, but not exactly organized politically as European nations

are, with clear national boundaries. They are connected through kinship ties,
something that goes back to the idea of a common birth or origin. Las Casas
does not understand this as implying inferiority. But to his opponents, such as
Sepulveda^ the 'Indians' were naturally, i.e. biologically, inferior. Las Casas
rejects this biological definition of peoplehood understood hierarchically, for
he argues that they were peaceful in their own lands. Hence, they did not
require or being civilized.
'pacification' He believes that 'nation' and 'race'
are coterminous in the American context.124
The Amerindians, for Las Casas, are rational, peaceful human beings who

happen to be spiritually in the wrong, for they follow inadequate gods. He is

not against their political forms of rule per se. He never decries the despotism
of the indigenous kings, nor does he attack their language or customs. His
concern is with the idea that Catholicism is the one true universal religion, and
that any other must be incorrect and misleading. He finds that the natives are
'Christians in the raw'. They are innocents who suffered as much as the Chris
tians in Europe suffered at the hands of the Turkish forces. Without going into
philosophical detail, Las Casas argues that human, divine and natural law all

122
Beltrân Nuno de Guzman 'bartered one mare against eight locals: against, that is,
eight members of the human race' (Short Account, p. 65). Las Casas actually calls them
'rational souls' (Brevisima, pp. 448-9).
123
They all possess souls ('animas', Brevisima, pp. 424-5).
124
That is, Amerindians are not merely culturally different, they possess fundamen
tally different moral and aesthetic qualities when compared to Europeans. This distinc
tion is reflected in their political organization.

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424 D. VON VACANO

oppose what the Spaniards did to the natives.125 Because he himself believes
in the legitimacy of Catholic universalism, he is forced to seek a way to incor
porate the natives into the fold of the Church without violence, for he thinks
violence is a violation of a basic tenet of Christianity, the love of one's neigh
bour. The most useful is the Spanish Crown, an imperial force with the institu
tions that would allow the Church's universalism to properly incorporate the
natives qua subjects of Spain.126 A crisis was at hand, for the Spaniards had
abandoned 'all
Christian sense of right and wrong'127 and had 'betrayed the
Lord'.128 fact, it is the Europeans,
In not the natives, who are 'animals'.129
Las Casas portrays the natives as
innocent... The simplest people in the world — unassuming, long-suffering,
unassertive, and —
submissive they are without malice or guile, and are
utterly faithful or obedient both to their own native lords and to the Spaniards
in whose service they now find themselves.130

One could read this charitably, as an effort to have a benign image of the
natives. To be sure, it is intended to persuade the King that the Amerindians
are not intractable. The portrayal of the natives as essentially peaceful plays
the rhetorical function of advancing a key tenet of Las Casas' own rhetorical

principle: to convert pagans, it is imperative to do so with peaceful means, the

central point as he expounds unico it in De
vocationis modo.m But at the same

time, Las Casas treats them

infantile, and as lacking some human attributes
as
which could be seen as part and parcel of being human (rancor, guile, wicked
ness). By setting the natives apart from the common understanding of normal
human psychology (which includes positive and negative traits), Las Casas
lays the basis of a human classificatory scheme, which we could call racial
since it refers to large categories of people as distinguished from others along
essential lines. This schema contradicts the universalistic aim of De unico
vocationis modo, which assumes all men are equal.132
The scheme is not only based on moral psychology. Las Casas does some
times make a connection to physical traits as well. 'They are among the least
robust of human beings; their delicate constitutions make them unable to

125
Short Account, p. 54.
126 LasCasas did not question the basic issue of whether Spain could have political
rule over the Americas. See Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political
Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory
1513-1830 (Hartford, 1998), p. 15.
127
Short Account, p. 69.
128
Ibid., p. 77.
129
Ibid., p. 101. 'Alemanes ο animales.'
130
Ibid., p. 9.
Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World, p. 63; see also Lewis Hanke, Estudios sobre
131

Bartolomé Las Casas (Caracas, 1968), p. 111.

132 Abbott does not remark on this.
Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World, p. 63.

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 LAS CASAS AND THE BIRTH OF RACE 425

withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost
any illness, no matter how mild.'133 In this way, Las Casas describes all
natives of the Americas as physically inferior to Europeans, a concept that has
links to the somatic component of later racial classifications. The natural
goodness of the natives is thus coupled to their biological weakness. When
moral or mental characteristics are coupled to corporeal or natural traits, we
find the origins of racialization. In an unintended way, Las Casas' work
stands at the centre of these origins by referring to physical characteristics in
his rhetorical construction of human difference.

Conclusion
The concept of 'race' is not simple; it is the product of a long and complex
process. This
process the perception of external
involves characteristics of
human beings as something that entails a generalized categorical distinction
made among human beings across diverse ethnic groups. It artificially creates
discrete human kinds. Historically, the seeds of this process can be found in
pre-modern periods, but it takes root in the early-modern era around the early
1500s. It is basically around the time of the conquest of the Americas by Spain
that racialization takes shape, for distinctions about ethnic or cultural differ
ence became transformed into discussions about fundamental or essential
differences among persons.
At the same time, some contemporaries of Las Casas argued that in fact the
Amerindians were not really human. Homunculi is the term that Sepulveda
used, something connoting sub-humanity.134 Sepulveda argued that the
natives were closer to animals such
spiders. as bees
words, the
and In other
debate at the time was not merely of
to translate different cultural
one how

practices from the language of one ethnicity to another; it was to confirm

either the very humanity or non-humanity of the 'humanoid' beings that had
been found in the Americas. This debate about the proper zoological or bio
logical classification of the Amerindians points to the nascent process of
racialization of the time. There is a natural or biological dimension to this
argument that is essential to what is race and which is lacking in ethnicity per
se. Race is as much about biology as it is about ethnicity, and it is socially con
structed when
arguments about both are made in conjunction to generate cat
egorical distinctions.
These distinctions are not merely scalar, they are also cardinal. In other
words, Las Casas and his contemporaries did not simply argue about the stage
of development at which the natives were thought to be located.
They argued
about whether they should be measured with the same scale as Europeans at
all. Thus, while there is a rank-ordering process at work in the of
thought

133
Short Account, p. 10. Emphases added.
134
In Démocrates Alter, where this means half-men or little men.

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426 D. VON VACANO

some of Las Casas' contemporaries that is present even in some of his own
writings, Las Casas' chief concern is to show that the natives are indeed
human although they are of a different sort compared to Europeans.
Through rhetoric, Las Casas was able to argue for a synthetic or inclusive
approach to the natives. Only under the rubric of rhetoric does his corpus gain
an overall coherence. His thought was addressed to a new era where humanity
was seen as universal. In this sense, Ο'Gorman is not correct to say that Las
Casas' thought was thoroughly Aristotelian, since Las Casas' intellectual uni
verse was not delimited by the polis and he did not accept the Philosopher's
emphasis on rationality or the distinction between the civilized and the bar
barian.135 A Christian city is a 'quasi-mystical union of men', as Pagden
avers,136 and this union would be made more perfect by the balance of virtues

of the Spanish and the natives. The Amerindians should be added to the
Spanish Crown as subjects, and their incorporation would be beneficial to
them as well as to Spain. They would be helped to become more civilized in
terms of social organization, but they would also bring to Spain their natural
goodness and benevolence, which Las Casas argued were glimmers of true
Christianity in a world where supposed Christians had become butchers of
human flesh. In this way, both sides would benefit and become better in their
union. For Las Casas, Indi fratres nostri sunt.137 A synthesis of civilizational

and moral virtues would make the Empire even more glorious.

Diego von Vacano TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

135
See Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice, p. 124.
136
pagcien^ fall of Natural Man, p. 135.
137 'The Indians are our brothers' (OC, IX, p. 664).

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