If Bartolomé de Las Casas was a pragmatist? (Spain and New World, 1500s)

The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin, New York: Random House, 1983, pages 631-32:

https://books.google.com/books?id=aEr07wJ21NYC&pg=PA632&lpg=PA632&dq=%22he+defended+the+Indians+in+the+Barcelona+Parliament%22&source=bl&ots=hZvT4kSEZj&sig=yg8DO7qe__ihFt8mQoAk9ieGeUY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiu79qLoILLAhVJ6mMKHTMSAowQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22he%20defended%20the%20Indians%20in%20the%20Barcelona%20Parliament%22&f=false

In his sermon on August 15, 1514, he publicly returned to the Governor all his Indian serfs. For the next fifty years he remained the Indians' most effective champion. Returning to Spain, he defended the Indians in the Barcelona Parliament. Then he persuaded Charles V to sponsor his utopian scheme to build towns where "free Indians" would collaborate with carefully selected Spanish farmers. [1] They would be settled on the Gulf of Paria, between present Trinidad and Venezuela, to provide the model for a new civilization combining the human resources of the Old World and the New. When this scheme failed, he retreated into a Dominican convent in Santo Domingo where he began to write his account of the Spanish in the Indies . . .

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In 1537, when Pope Paul's Sublimis Deus proclaimed the grand principle, . . .

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Again he tried to demonstrate his unorthodox approach, [2] this time by a new settlement in Guatemala, now part of Costa Rica. When Las Casas returned to Spain, he persuaded Charles V to sign the New Laws declaring that the grants of Indian serfs were not hereditary and requiring Spanish encomenderos to liberate their serfs after one generation [emphasis added]. As part of a papal plan that Las Casas himself wrote, [3] he was created bishop of Chiapa expressly to protect the Indians and promote model settlements of Spanish farmers and free Indians. But within two years Spanish settlers sabotaged the scheme and forced Las Casas to return to Spain.

The public climax of Las Casas' struggle provided a spectacle unique in the history of colonization. On April 16, 1550, Charles V, impelled by Las Casas' doubts and accusations, ordered that conquests in the New World be suspended and not be resumed until his theologians had agreed on a just way of proceeding.
I'm counting three attempts to set up model settlements. The problem with these types of endeavors is that they usually aren't organic to the main flow of life and hardly ever live up to expectations.

On the other hand, the part I put in bold is potentially the real thing. If Bartolomé de las Casas had been successful at getting in the right kind of administrators and/or had been an administrator himself, this might have changed everything.
 
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de las Casas was only ever able to achieve reform in the distant metropole; Philip II believed in his ideals, but ultimately gold and silver came before the welfare of the Indians. It was only the Encomendero Conspiracy of Don Martin Cortes (the legitimate one) that really weakened them in New Spain.

The local de facto model trumps the de jure laws of Spain.

And yeah, model communities didn't work all that well. At least they wouldn't be slave raid magnets like they were in South America.
 
I certainly agree with you on the gulf between de jure and de facto.

But I love the possibility that slavery could be phased out, just a twenty year mistake, not something that drags on and on.

And please notice the above says Indian serfs. In theory, nobility has both rights and obligations, and serfs have rights.
 
It's not a possibility.

The entire economic impetus of the New World outside of the settler colonies was the use of forced labor to produce minerals and cash crops. Furthermore, as encomenderos or users of the Incan mita system, the conqueror's obligations were more paternalistic and less legalistic than the complex protections seen in Western Europe.

A New Spain without some kind of forced labor cannot exist.
 
There might be another opening, and that's people's reaction to inflation.

I've read that all this currency inflation wasn't great for Spanish farmers. And I imagine that the nobles still at home aren't going to be too thrilled about these wannabe nobles who are basically cheating as they see it.

From my modern perspective, the most important number is current growth rate, and then secondly, inflation and unemployment. Most people rank inflation as the more important of the two and view that as the more mature issue, rather viewing unemployment it seems as more of an emotive issue. Not exactly my view! In large part because I graduated from high school the year before the 1982 recession.

In any case, concern with inflation resonates with a heck of a lot of people. And there are valid reasons to be concerned about it, just don't oversell it.
 
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