The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part three: Bartolomé de Las Casas and Revolutionary Theocracy (3)
Sepúlveda Enters the Picture
The Emperor’s concession on the New Laws did not mean that official Spain was no longer open to arguments for colonial reform. Las Casas, back in Spain, remained active and had powerful influence. He soon discovered that Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (encouraged by the conquistador Cortés, among others) had submitted a book to be approved for publication, where the military subjection of Indian communities was justified. Sepúlveda also claimed that the Indians were drastically inferior to the Spaniards culturally. They were not unimprovable: they could be instructed in Christianity, and over time their cultural level could be raised, though to what extent is never really made clear. But currently they were so degraded culturally (“almost more like monkeys than men”, it is said in one draft (15)) that they ought to be seen as examples of those naturally subject peoples Aristotle refers to, who need higher peoples to rule them. They would need Spanish rule for a very long time to come.
Las Casas conducted “a well-orchestrated campaign”, as one of his editors puts it, (16) to prevent this book being published. And again, at least since the late 19th century those who find Las Casas obnoxious or disturbing have been pointing to this as an example of his intolerance (Las Casas the Censor is a section-heading of Dumont’s. (17)) To be sure, he was no Voltaire. He was not prepared to defend the right to free expression of someone who was saying what he himself thought was false and harmful. In the context, such a principle would have been plainly absurd. The way to defend the Indians from destruction was certainly not to promote free expression for writers who justified colonial violence and oppression.
Sepúlveda, finding that publication was effectively barred, produced a Spanish version of his book and put that in circulation. He also produced a short Apologia giving his main arguments in more theological form, which he managed to have published in Rome. The Spanish authorities promptly banned this book from circulation in Spanish territories and ordered any copies in Spain to be seized. However, Charles V, disturbed by the conflict between his court chronicler Sepúlveda and the famous reformer Las Casas, eventually ordered the matter to be formally debated. And this is how the controversy of Valladolid, one of the most fascinating disputes in the intellectual history of Europe, came into being.
A recent editor of this controversy, Nestor Capdevila, has this to say: “The controversy between Sepúlveda and Las Casas is an introduction to the ambivalence of European expansion, not only because it is quasi-original but because the tension between the common ideological principles and the opposed politics is at a maximum. Sepúlveda justifies wars and economic exploitation by the contradiction in the Indians’ “being”. They are barbarous men: by full right they belong to the human race, but they cannot fulfil their humanity except by submitting themselves to the Spaniards, who are Christians and more rational. Now for Las Casas, this humanitarian justification of imperialism is the negation of the humanity which the Indians’ self-proclaimed benefactors pretend to recognise in them. Humanitarianism contains a dehumanisation which makes all violence possible. What Sepúlveda presents as an expansion of Christianity and of reason, is for Las Casas an invitation to engage in the genocide which is “the destruction of the Indies”. Within the controversy, dispossession, servitude and depopulation appear (for Sepúlveda) as the regrettable consequences or deplorable abuses of the legitimate imperialist application of universal principles, and (for Las Casas) as the immediate negation of those principles. Quite clearly, these are two individuals who defend their positions with reason and passion. But the controversy is the unity of two points of view where Europe appears contradictorily to itself.
It is scarcely anachronistic to see in Sepúlveda the first systematic theorist of the right to civilise and in Las Casas the inventor of the thematics of genocide.” (18)