ABSTRACT
When Spanish colonisers, soldiers, and churchmen landed in the Caribbean in 1492, the Hispanic monarchy already had many years of experience in colonial conquest and dominion. For a long time, these prior acts were lost in the shadows of two great adventures that coincided chronologically and later would help revive an unfinished national project after the loss of Spain’s last colonies in America and the Pacific in 1898. Castilian territorial expansion in the New World followed quickly behind indigenous demographic collapse, the latter being the result of epidemics and the subsequent destruction of the great Amerindian political systems in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Castile’s imperial beginnings thus were not auspicious in terms of easy stabilisation of that vast and remote territory, so far and so different from the European and Mediterranean worlds. Until well into the sixteenth century, the conquest was driven by destruction and slaving.
