All the World is Human

What does it mean to be human? Who gets to decide? And what rights follow from that claim? 

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of global encounter and upheaval. Within decades of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean, European occupation brought devastating disease, violence, and forced labor to Indigenous communities in what would become known as the West Indies. These changes were not only economic or religious, but deeply philosophical and legal. The logic of the Spanish colonial expansion frequently cast Indigenous peoples as less than fully rational or capable of self-rule, providing justification for conquest and enslavement. 

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was both a participant in this colonial world and one of its most persistent critics. Over time - and after witnessing firsthand the astounding levels of violence and brutality inflicted on native communities by the Spanish - he underwent a profound moral and religious transformation that led him to challenge Spanish colonial violence and to insist on the moral equality of  Indigenous peoples.

Through chronicles, legal arguments, and petitions to the Spanish Crown, Las Casas insisted on the full humanity of the Indigenous communities and challenged the moral legitimacy of conquest. His writings helped shape early debates about empire, justice, and human dignity, even as they remained constrained by the assumptions of his own time and the structures of the empire which he never fully rejected.

'All the World is Human' traces de las Casas' transformations, the historical forces that shaped his thought, and the enduring afterlives of his work in debates about colonialism and human rights.

"All the nations of the world are made up of human beings, and of each and every human being there is one definition and one only: that they are rational. [This means that] all have their understanding and will and their free choice, inasmuch as they are fashioned to the image and likeness of God...all have the natural principles or geminal capacity to understand an to learn, and to know the science and things that they know not."

- Bartolomé de las Casas. Witness: Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. Edited and translated by George Sanderlin, with a foreword by Gustavo Gutiérrez. Orbis Books, 1992, p. xv.