ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Thomas More follows de las Casas and the other Spanish friars who denounced Spanish depredations in the “New World.” It’s common knowledge that More used Utopia as a vehicle for social criticism. Through Hythlodaeus, for example, More lacerates the enclosure movement, hanging people for theft, and rulers who prefer conquest to ruling well their present territories. Hythlodaeus also denounces private property as the source of all social ills (103–107). More uses his fiction to criticize everything wrong with European and English society, and that includes colonialism. The fact that More designates a civilization in the Americas as “The Best State of a Commonwealth” constitutes a radical revision of previous assessments of these lands. More also intuits that transferring Western technology (the compass) to a culture unprepared for it might lead to disaster, and More shows that conversion to Christianity threatens to destroy the very political order that makes Utopia superior to Europe.
