Bartolomé de las Casas
Criticisms

Las Casas has also often been accused of exaggerating the atrocities he described in the Indies, some scholars holding that the initial population figures given by him were too high, which would make the population decline look worse than it actually was, and that epidemics of European disease were the prime cause of the population decline, not violence and exploitation. Demographic studies such as those of colonial Mexico by Sherburne F. Cook in the mid-20th century suggested that the decline in the first years of the conquest was indeed drastic, ranging between 80 and 90%, due to many different causes but all ultimately traceable to the arrival of the Europeans. The overwhelming cause was disease introduced by the Europeans. Historians have also noted that exaggeration and inflation of numbers was the norm in writing in 16th-century accounts, and both contemporary detractors and supporters of Las Casas were guilty of similar exaggerations.

The Dominican friars Antonio de Montesinos and Pedro de Córdoba had reported extensive violence already in the first decade of the colonization of the Americas, and throughout the conquest of the Americas, there were reports of abuse of the natives from friars and priests and ordinary citizens, and many massacres of indigenous people were reported in full by those who perpetrated them. Even some of Las Casas's enemies, such as Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, reported many gruesome atrocities committed against the Indians by the colonizers. All in all, modern historians tend to disregard the numerical figures given by Las Casas, but they maintain that his general picture of a violent and abusive conquest represented reality.

One persistent point of criticism has been Las Casas's repeated suggestions of replacing Indian with African slave labor. Even though he regretted that position later in his life and included an apology in his History of the Indies, some later criticism held him responsible for the institution of the transatlantic slave trade. One detractor, the abolitionist David Walker, called Las Casas a "wretch... stimulated by sordid avarice only," holding him responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Africans. Other historians, such as John Fiske writing in 1900, denied that Las Casas's suggestions affected the development of the slave trade. Benjamin Keen likewise did not consider Las Casas to have had any substantial impact on the slave trade, which was well in place before he began writing. That view is contradicted by Sylvia Wynter, who argued that Las Casas's 1516 Memorial was the direct cause of Charles V granting permission in 1518 to transport the first 4,000 African slaves to Jamaica.

A growing corpus of scholarship has sought to deconstruct and reassess the role of Las Casas in Spanish colonialism. Daniel Castro, in his Another Face of Empire (2007), takes on such a task. He argues that he was more of a politician than a humanitarian and that his liberation policies were always combined with schemes to make colonial extraction of resources from the natives more efficient. He also argues that Las Casas failed to realize that by seeking to replace indigenous spirituality with Christianity, he was undertaking a religious colonialism that was more intrusive than the physical one. The responses to his work are varied. Some claim that Castro's portrayal of Las Casas had an air of anachronism. Others have agreed with Castro's deconstruction of Las Casas as a nuanced and contradictory historical figure.
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