The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America

Lewis Hanke's The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America is a classic scholarly study examining the intense internal Spanish colonial and theological debate over the moral status and treatment of indigenous peoples, centered on figures like Bartolome de las Casas and the Valladolid debate. Hanke's authority rests on close archival work with Spanish colonial and ecclesiastical records documenting a genuine and often underappreciated strand of internal Spanish self-criticism during the conquest era. As a mid-twentieth century foundational study, it has been both built upon and in places qualified by later postcolonial and indigenous-centered scholarship that reads the same debates with more attention to indigenous voices and to how limited the debate's practical effect on colonial policy actually was.