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Bartolome de las Casas

Latin American · Latin America · 1484 to 1566

Spanish friar who argued that Indigenous peoples of the Americas have the same rights as all people, and that conquest is wrong.

What it is

Bartolomé de las Casas was a Spanish priest and later Dominican friar of the sixteenth century. He first lived in the Caribbean as a colonist who profited from the forced labour of Indigenous people, then spent most of his life arguing that they should be treated as full human beings and that conquest by force was wrong.

He was probably born in Seville, in 1484 by one account and perhaps ten years earlier by another, and died in Madrid in July 1566. He wrote the History of the Indies and the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and he served for a time as bishop of Chiapas.

The main ideas

  • Human equality. He argued that Indigenous peoples of the Americas were fully human and had the same claim to fair treatment as anyone else. He opposed the view that they were naturally inferior and could be conquered or enslaved.
  • Against forced labour. He criticised the encomienda, the royal grant under which colonists received land together with its Indigenous inhabitants, a system he had once taken part in himself.
  • Peaceful conversion. He held that people should be brought to the Christian faith by peaceful teaching and not by war.
  • Conquest as injustice. In his writing he describes the conquerors' cruelty and treats the conquest as a wrong done to a people.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone who benefits from an arrangement everyone around them accepts, and who comes to see it as unjust. Las Casas did this in 1514, when he gave up his own land and its labourers and began to speak against the system. This is an illustration drawn from his life, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Hispaniola (1502). He sailed to the island and received a land grant with Indigenous labourers, and he took part in expeditions.
  • 1514. He gave up his own grant and began to speak out.
  • A colony in Venezuela. His plan for a peaceful settlement on the coast of Venezuela failed in the early 1520s.
  • The Dominicans. After this failure he entered the Dominican order.
  • The Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. A book that describes the conquerors' treatment of Indigenous peoples.
  • The New Laws (1542). Spanish laws limiting the encomienda. He was pressing the case at court at the time and was then named bishop to see them enforced.
  • Bishop of Chiapas (1544). Colonists resisted him, and he returned to Spain in 1547.
  • The debate with Sepúlveda (about 1550). At Valladolid he argued against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who held that Indigenous peoples were inferior and could justly be subdued.

Questions and criticism

  • A late change of heart. He took part in the conquest of the Caribbean and held Indigenous labourers himself for years before his change of course. It is fair to ask how to weigh his later work against his earlier part in what he came to oppose.
  • Did his reforms work? The New Laws were passed, but colonists resisted them. It is fair to ask how much changed on the ground.
  • Whose voice? He spoke for Indigenous peoples as a Spanish priest, and it is fair to ask how much of their own voice his writing carries.
  • Slavery. At one stage he supported the use of enslaved Africans in the colonies, and accounts differ on whether he later withdrew that support.

Close neighbours

The pages on Thomas More and Erasmus sit nearby, as other writers of the same century.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Thomas Aquinas · He argued from Aquinas' account of natural law and human reason, which holds for all peoples.

Other Latin American thinkers

Sources we used

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