Las Casas proposed African enslavement as Indian replacement

Evidence

Not unexpectedly, Las Casas, whose bitter charges against the conquistadors and whose calculations of the terrifying numbers of Indian deaths had done much toward obtaining the New Laws from Charles V, assumed full responsibility. He wrote of himself in his Historia general de las Indias: “The priest Las Casas was the first to suggest that one should introduce Africans to the West Indies. He did not know what he was doing.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the hagiographic reading of Las Casas common in colonial histories; connects to the book’s argument that abolitionist-humanist impulses produced new enslavement.