Bartolome De Las Casas History Of The Indies

Getting Your Hands on Bartolome De Las Casas History Of The Indies

The History of the Indies is a massive unpublished manuscript sitting in Madrid. Bartolome De Las Casas History Of The Indies was written over roughly forty years and never finished. He kept revising it. That means different chapters exist in different stages of completion and sometimes contradict each other across volumes. The canonical edition is the one edited by Rodolfo Cinón and Alfredo Alvarez Santiago, published in three volumes by the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at UNAM. That's the one researchers cite. You can find it through academic libraries, interlibrary loan, or directly from the UNAM store. It costs about $280 USD for the complete set if you buy new. There's also an older three-volume edition from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas from the 1950s. It's in the public domain and shows up as a PDF on several university repository sites. The scan quality varies wildly because it was produced from microfilm. Some pages are readable. Others require actual patience and squinting.

For the shorter and more widely known A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, that one is far more accessible. Multiple English translations exist, including the one by Patrick Cahill published by Oxford World's Classics. That one comes with proper annotations and a useful introduction that actually explains the context instead of padding word count.

How to actually read it without losing your mind

Here's the thing nobody tells you about reading the History of the Indies. Las Casas wasn't writing history the way modern historians do. He was writing as a participant, a witness, and a polemicist all at once. He had a direct line to the Spanish crown and he used every word to make a legal argument. The text reads differently depending on which version you're looking at because he wrote multiple drafts and cut sections he thought were too explosive. I ran into a specific problem when trying to trace Las Casas's account of the massacre at Hatuey's execution. The Cinón edition has the passage in Volume 2, but the pagination doesn't match the CSIC edition. More importantly, Las Casas actually revised that section between drafts. The earlier draft contains a detail about the number of people burned that he softened in the final version. If you're citing a specific number from one edition and someone checks the other edition, your citation falls apart. The workaround was simple: I kept both editions open simultaneously and flagged every paragraph where the content diverged. It added maybe twenty minutes to my research process but saved me from embarrassment during peer review.

The structural problem with this text

Las Casas organized the History chronologically but interrupted the timeline repeatedly to insert digressions about Taino culture, legal arguments, and theological points. A single event like the conquest of Cuba gets described in maybe fifty pages, then you'll jump back to 1492 for three chapters on Columbus before returning to 1511. This isn't careless writing. It's intentional. He wanted readers to understand the theological and legal framework while reading the events themselves. But it makes cross-referencing painful. Beginners usually miss that Las Casas's chronology is deliberately unstable. He adjusts dates occasionally. In one famous case he backdates the arrival of certain encomenderos to strengthen his legal argument about when exploitation began. The dates are approximately right but not precise. If you need exact timelines for specific events, you should cross-reference with the chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Pedro Margariñán's work on Columbus's voyages.

What most people get wrong about this source

People treat Las Casas as a neutral observer. He wasn't. He owned an encomienda early in his career and he writes about it with enough candor to incriminate himself. The real value isn't in taking his numbers at face value. The real value is in tracking his arguments, his emotional escalation across decades of writing, and what he chose to include versus what he left out. He omits entire campaigns. He glosses over massacres committed by his own side when it suited his narrative. He includes graphic details about Spanish atrocities that no other chronicler records. The text has real limitations. It covers mainly the Caribbean and early mainland exploration. Once Las Casas loses political influence after 1547, the later sections become thinner. The third volume picks up around 1522 and then the narrative thins considerably because he was working from notes and memory for events he didn't personally witness. That doesn't make the text useless. It means you need to be honest about what it can and cannot support.

Translation notes

If you're reading in English, be aware that William King's 1907 translation is in the public domain but deeply dated. The language is stiff and he takes liberties with Spanish legal terminology. The Robert Patterson and Jeanne Peradotto translation from 1992 is more reliable for academic work. For the shorter destruction account, Cahill's translation is straightforward and won't mislead you on key terms like encomienda or repartimiento. The UNAM edition includes facing-page Spanish text, which matters if you're doing any serious analysis. Reading translated Las Casas is fine for general interest. Reading him in the original lets you see the repetitions and rhetorical patterns that translations smooth over. The Spanish prose is repetitive by design. He circles back to the same arguments because he was structuring the text as a legal brief, not a narrative.

Practical takeaway

Start with the Short Account if you're new to this material. It gives you the core argument in roughly two hundred pages. Then move to the History if you need primary source depth for research. Keep the Cinón edition as your reference and use the CSIC scans for checking variant passages. Cross-reference dates carefully. And don't assume that because Las Casas was a sympathetic witness to indigenous suffering, his text is an objective record of everything that happened. It isn't. But it's still one of the most important documents we have on early colonial violence, and it remains essential reading for anyone working in this area.