Las Casas was only one link in the chains of African enslavement

Evidence

Las Casas, of course, had miscast himself in the drama and tragedy of Indian and African enslavement. It was an old tactic of his. Though not entirely innocent of guilt in this matter, he was only a link in the chains fastened around the necks of the enslaved. But as the son of an Andalusian aristocratic family, he was better placed than most to understand that his appeal to the Emperor on behalf of the Indian had to flatter the imperial ego as well as shock the imperial morality. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 631

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Robinson reframes the ‘Las Casas guilt’ narrative: the trade outran any single individual’s agency, pointing to systemic rather than personal causation.

Related

• Las Casas proposed African enslavement as Indian replacement (similarity 0.84)
• The advocacy of Las Casas directly channeled African slavery into the Americas (similarity 0.82)
• Las Casas proposed bringing Africans to the West Indies to spare Indians (similarity 0.82)
• Las Casas himself proposed importing Africans to replace dying Indians (similarity 0.80)
• Aristotle’s racial hierarchy outlasted anticolonial critiques like Las Casas’s (similarity 0.79)