ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the major debates pertaining to the institutions of encomienda and slavery, followed by epic disputations about the legality of conquests. This chapter first chronicles the trajectory of economic enterprises in Hispaniola that structured the emergent encomienda system with its various tribute and labor obligations, and pervasive maltreatment of the native inhabitants. Next, this chapter addresses the emergence and flourishing of the institution of forced labor by which Spaniards made slaves through trade and wars. In Las Casas’s juridical assessment and condemnation of slavery, he persistently applied divine, natural, civil, and canon laws, as well as the fundamental natural rights to life and liberty. This chapter then explicates Las Casas’s juridical criteria for Spanish sovereignty within the context of a three-fold jurisdiction—papal, monarchical, and Indigenous. Next, this chapter examines the establishment of dominium through conquests undertaken for the objectives of wealth and prestige, and legitimated by the requerimiento. Other Lascasian premises related to just war are also examined: that Indigenous people had just cause for war, that they had always waged just war against the Christians, and that all the wars fought by the Spaniards in the Indies were iniquitous, diabolical, tyrannical, and infinitely unjust.
