Las Casas, a Dominican friar who witnessed the early Spanish conquest of the Americas, wrote this searing eyewitness indictment in 1542 and published it in Seville in 1552. Addressed to Prince Philip of Spain, it catalogs the massacres, enslavement, and destruction visited upon the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the American mainland. The account helped spur Spain's New Laws of 1542 and stands as one of the earliest and most influential protests against colonial brutality.
Author: Bartolomé de las Casas · Original publisher: First published Seville, 1552 (written 1542; *Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias*)
