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Locke read “Josephus de Acosta” closely. He agreed with the Jesuit’s “great conjecture” that large parts of the New World were pristine, inhabited not by the storied Aztecs or the cultured Inka but by artless peoples whose simplicity offered a window back in time to what Europe was like before written records and political society. In the beginning, all was America. Not Tenochtitlán or Cuzco, those wondrous cities that bewitched Cortés and Pizarro. Not what Tenochtitlán became—the densely populated Mexico City, the great metropolis of the Catholic Spanish Empire. But America, empty and unclaimed.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

What set Acosta apart from other Conquest chroniclers was that he didn’t posit an either-or, this-or-that opposition between savagery and civilization. Rather, the traveling Jesuit offered a secular evolutionary account of the transition between primitive and complex societies. He identified human history as passing through definable stages. First: simple societies which mostly hunt and gather, and which have neither leader nor religion. Second: close-to-the-land settled communities that were governed loosely by elders. Third: a kingdom or empire that exercises dominion and is organized around a clear political hierarchy and religion. According to Acosta, America was home to all three. Societies like the Inka and Aztecs had reached the highest levels of civilization. Other societies were perhaps moving toward more complexity but their mode of life still fell within one of the first two stages.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Hugo Grotius, who was born in the western Netherlands and wrote in the early 1600s, appreciated Vitoria but complained of the absolutism of his followers, of “Molina and others,” and the obstacles they placed in the way of waging war. He disputed Molina’s argument that violations of natural law could only be punished by local civil authorities. In other words, under Molina’s rule, no European power could legitimately wage war under the pretext of protecting Native Americans from their own rulers or from other Native Americans. Grotius, in contrast, said that not only did European empires have the right to punish violations of natural law, but so could private-trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company. Grotius here was defending Dutch imperialism in Asia. Heralded as the founder of international law, Grotius advanced a generous array of rights for European nations to punish, wage war, and appropriate land. Europe’s storied protoliberal legal theorists didn’t want to end conquest but regulate how it was executed.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The establishment of North American settlements added a new, confusing dimension to England’s comparisons with Spain. The references pushed against themselves: The English were and weren’t the Spanish. The Irish were and weren’t Native Americans. Some of the most vicious Irish haters imagined the English flying across the Atlantic on a humanitarian mission saving noble innocent Indians from the Spanish. “The people of America crye out to us,” wrote Richard Hakluyt, an English historian and ceaseless promoter of colonialism, “to come and helpe them.” There was “no doubt” that were the queen to take the “firme of America,” all the “natural people there with all humanitie, curtesie, and freedoms” will place themselves under her authority and “revolte cleane from the Spaniarde.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The English also confirmed their own goodness by reading Las Casas on Spanish badness. Las Casas’s Brevísima Relación had been translated into English many times throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As relentless as a modern slasher film, with its descriptions of Spanish hounds ripping a “little sweet babie” to shreds, the book helped give rise to what scholars later called the Black Legend. Against Spanish avariciousness and excess, England saw itself as moderate. Against Catholic decadence and superstition, Protestants were modern and rational. Cruel Spain. Just England. Yet the English also read Las Casas to rouse themselves to violence against the Irish. The Puritan translation of A Brief History urged Cromwell to avenge the “twenty millions of the souls of the slaughter’d Indians” destroyed by “Popish Cruelties.” The logic went that since the Catholic Irish were allied with Catholic Spain, they were as responsible for the destruction of the Indies as were Cortés and Pizarro.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The famous tapadas limeñas moved through public life completely veiled, with only one eye showing, a vexing mix of burlesque and provocation. Before Toledo’s arrival, efforts to ban the style were met with a women’s strike: “Domestic anarchy loomed. Women refused to tend to their houses, servants dallied, cooking was bland, and children couldn’t find their mother to hug them and wipe their noses …. Everything was upside down.” Women resisted Toledo’s renewed efforts to ban the saya y manto, as the skirt and cloak that made up the attire was called. The fashion would transfix visitors to Lima for centuries. Some saw Islam: “They could be taken for those phantoms of invisible women that travelers to the Orient find in Constantinople and all the Muslim cities,” wrote a French traveler. Others glimpsed Indian sorcery in the “one sinister eye peering” out of the veil. Another observer thought Africa lay behind the “treacherous” shawls, which made it impossible “to guess the color of the skin” and might conceal “an African, black as the night” and “flat-nosed as death.” Wealthy and poor women alike adopted the dress, adding to the uncertainty. The cloak “afforded women only advantages” and “men only discomforts.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Erasmus, Thomas Moore, and other Christians were, at the time of Las Casas’s most active period, elaborating a new humanism. But it was Las Casas, and only Las Casas, who hitched the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition that promised deliverance to political action. And such action: he witnessed, he wrote, he preached, he lobbied, he theorized, he consoled, he condemned, and he conspired. Las Casas stood against the unfathomable brutalities of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, advancing a moralism that, no matter how much he appealed to the laws of medieval Catholicism, pointed toward a modern ethics of equality. In this, he was a kind of Adam.

— America, América by Greg Grandin