Notes
Part 1
A description of the conquest of New Spain, through the lens of the contemporaneous political debate around the morality of the colonization of America, and the subjugation of its inhabitants. Given the dominance of Catholicism in Spain, this debate was of a fundamentally religious nature.
The central figure—as presented by the book, at least—in opposing the subjugation of the natives was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest. Who preached, and wrote many books on the injustice of slavery, and the cruel treatment of natives.
An interesting point is that idea that Spain had, which was that all of America was, in effect, a papal gift to their kingdom.
Ultimately, the material benefits and restructuring of the Spanish economy around resource extraction and slavery in the Americas was more influential in determining their policy than the internal religious debate. In general, while following these historical figures, who wrote about their ideas and justifications for the grander political events, is interesting, it’s not convincing as to understanding the functioning of history. Why these things happened and not others does not seem driven by ideology, so much as it does in natural emergence of the constraints presented to many individuals, acting as a collective.
Part 2
About the settlement of New England. Would have liked some more detail about the settlement here, which is not particularly well in depth, but also not what the book is really about. The takeaways here are that the English really hated the Irish, that disease had already more than decimated the native population by the time serious settlements like Jamestown had been undergone, and that the English had complete contempt for the native population, acting without mercy towards them. After being attacked in some cases, the broad counter was to wage war against the natives, much in the same way as the English had against the Irish. This is the comparison the book stresses here.
Part 3
Contrasts the American and Venezuelan revolutions. Learned some interesting things about the latter. Francisco de Miranda was an interesting character, in particular, having been a party to the new American republic, and to the French revolution, even fighting in it, before eventually unsuccessfully attempting a coup in Venezuela. Ironically, a couple years after the failed coup, Spain has too much internal strife, and leaves anyways, leaving a power vacuum, which eventually gets filled with a model of government based off of the US, with elections in 1811.
One interesting point is that already here, you have the trend of trying to embed social institutions within the constitution, which you still see today. For example, in Chile, a lot of the recent political consternation was about modifications to the constitution, centered around this conception of the social realm as belong to the political, and thus needing constitutional authority to help shape it. The difficulty in trying to mold society through a centralized political authority is that it’s even harder to control culture than it is an economy, and central planning thus fails in even trickier ways. Having this project emanate from aspirational goals in the constitution also results in making promises that you can’t keep, sometimes simply because they’re contradictory, but more often just that the provision of some resource is not an absolute promise that can be upheld. If there’s not enough food to go around, no amount of morality and principle alone can create more of it.