December 24, 2005
The Black Legend - Anti Spanish sentiment in the colonies

Starting as an essay on anti-Spanish sentiment in the Philippines, this moves to ways that same prejudice was used to justify non-Hispanic settlement of the New World. Spanish burning of all the Maya books would justify it for me.

'La Leyenda Negra' revisited - INQ7.net

The Spaniards, by the way, were their own worst enemies. The Black Legend started in 1552, when Bartolome de las Casas, formerly bishop of Chiapas, published "Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Yndias," which has been described as "a powerful and lasting indictment of Spanish behavior toward Indian populations in the New World." (How the good friar could have described it as brief is weird; the work is 4,000 pages long.) Naturally, the Protestants picked up Las Casas' condemnation with alacrity and used it to argue for a greater non-Spanish European presence in the New World and, of course, for their own imperialistic designs.

Posted by Dave at December 24, 2005 12:09 AM