Las Casas: "the Apostle of the Indies

Bartolomé de Las Casas arrived in the New World as a young Spanish colonist, heir to the conquistadors' faith and their appetite for land. He owned slaves. He participated in the brutal machinery of conquest. Then something cracked open in him, a confrontation with the unbearable suffering of the Indigenous peoples that transformed this privileged planter into the most vocal defender of their humanity in all of colonial Spain. Alice J. Knight traces this extraordinary metamorphosis with care, setting Las Casas's awakening against the violent backdrop of the Age of Exploration: the plantations, the encomienda system, theCE conversions forced at swordpoint. What emerges is not a saint's portrait but something more useful: a study of moral courage in action, of a man who saw clearly and could not look away. Knight renders his decades-long battle against colonial cruelty, the debates, the petitions, the lonely stand before the Spanish Crown, with historical texture and genuine drama. This is the story of one conscience against an empire.