A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

A short account written in 1542 by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who had come to the Caribbean as a settler and later became a defender of its Indigenous peoples and Bishop of Chiapas. Written to press the Spanish crown to reform colonial rule, it fed the debates behind the New Laws of 1542, which restricted the encomienda system of forced labour; it was printed in Seville in 1552, addressed to the future Philip II. Las Casas moves region by region, from Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico to Mexico, Central America and Peru, describing massacres, enslavement, torture and the death of whole populations at the hands of the conquerors. He insists that the native peoples were peaceful, reasonable and capable of Christian faith, and that the conquest was unjust in its cause and its conduct. Later translations were used by Spain's European rivals as propaganda, and historians have long questioned some of his population figures, though not the reality of the atrocities.

It is one of the earliest and most forceful protests against colonial violence by a member of the colonising nation, and it began lasting debates about human rights and the conquest of the Americas.