So, this is a good point for us to talk about your main argument. You can take as long as you want to trace how Latin America has contributed to the making of the modern world.
GG: So the book begins with the Spanish Conquest, really with the arrival of Bartolomé de Las Casas in Hispaniola, and the beginning of a reformation within the Catholic Church, a reaction to the brutality of the conquest, an awareness of the density of the New World’s population, and a questioning of Spain’s right to enslave, to rule, to take.
Take Las Casas’s dissent. What right, he asked, does Spain have to rule over people, who clearly have reason, have a conception of property and possess property, who organize themselves in political communities? And he’s forcing these questions nearly a century before the first British ships even reach Jamestown.
Needless to say, the reality of the conquest was unimaginable cruelty and suffering, and murder on a mass scale. But the crisis provoked within the Church was consequential. Because of its presumption of universalism—because it claimed to be the mediator between the mundane and the divine, between humans and God—the Catholic Church had to rhetorically defend itself as a magisterium of mercy, charity, and love. Its priests were shepherds tending to sheep.
Most royal officials kept filing reports saying the sheep were doing fine. But Las Casas and others like him kept posting anguished letters to Spain reporting that the sheep were being slaughtered at an incalculable rate.
Las Casas was just one of a cohort of moral revolutionaries—some on the front line of Spanish dispossession in the Americas, others, such as Francisco de Vitoria, in seminar rooms in Spain—that began to lay out the terms of political and legal modernism, related to equality, rights, and sovereignty.
In their ascent to empire, the English paid attention to Spanish debates. They are paying attention to Vitoria’s questioning of the right of conquest, to Las Casas insisting on the humanity of Native Americans, to other argued for the outlawing of slavery and wars of aggression. In fact, right around the time of Jamestown in the early 1600s, would-be English colonists come together to discuss whether they should issue some kind of declaration or proclamation, to justify what they hope to accomplish in the New World. Their discussion repeatedly returns to Spanish arguments, and how, for over 50 years, Spanish jurists had been trying to find a justification for dominion and possession, but couldn’t. They couldn’t find—once you do away with papal dispensation—a legal foundation for war, conquest, and enslavement. And so the English conclude, maybe it is better we don’t say anything.
This is one of the book’s through lines. Spain, on the one hand, presided over an empire in which Native Americans, and then Africans, were the main thing: obviously essential for the extraction of wealth from the colonies but also for the foundation of Catholic morality, a source of unending debate over the nature of humanity and equality. Then, on the other hand, there’s fledgling England, which evaded and denied. Its settlers took the fact that an epidemic wiped out most of the Indigenous population of coastal New England prior to the arrival of the Mayflower as the cornerstone of their property rights regime—empty land was theirs for the taking—and as proof of God’s grace. Without downplaying the importance of Native Americans in the early slave trade, or in the later fur economy, Native Americans, except to a few English moralists, remained shadow dancers, flickering around the fringes of the Puritan imagination, used as plot devices to keep the story of the pilgrims’ progress moving forward.