SOURCE: Collard, Andrée. Introduction to History of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas, translated and edited by Andrée Collard, pp. ix-xxiv. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971.

In the following essay, Collard argues that Las Casas' History of the Indies, which recounts Spain's discovery and conquest of the Americas between 1492 and 1520, was the greatest and most influential attack on Spanish treatment of Native Americans.

Roughly 500 years after the discovery of America man again accomplishes spectacular achievements in space while nations again threaten to be destroyed by their imperialistic expansion and disregard for human rights. Just as twentieth-century America has its angry voices to denounce these human failings, so Spain in the sixteenth century had Bartolomé de las Casas or Casaus (1474-1566),¹ a man whose obsession to end the Spanish tyranny in the New World evolved into a scathing attack against imperialism. Although Las Casas was among...