Spanish colonization of the Americas (1492+)
The origin point of European overseas colonialism
Beginning with Columbus’s 1492 landfall, Spain conquered and colonized vast parts of the Americas, imposing the encomienda (a grant of indigenous labour to a colonist) and the Requerimiento (a legal demand for submission). Bartolomé de las Casas became the era’s most famous critic of the resulting devastation.
What happened
To give conquest a legal-religious form, the Crown required conquistadors to read the Requerimiento to indigenous peoples — a demand that they accept the Church and the Spanish sovereigns, with war and enslavement threatened for refusal.
we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them… and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault (the Requerimiento, 1513)
Under each definition
Conquest and administrative/extractive rule over foreign peoples and lands.
Spanish settlement, land grants, and demographic transformation mark it as settler colonialism as well as extractive.
This predates independence; the neo-colonial frame belongs to the post-independence era.
The archetype of European colonialism in ordinary usage.
The case that the label applies
A European crown asserted sovereignty over foreign peoples and their land, backed by force and codified in law — the founding template of colonial conquest.
The case against
Some Spanish jurists (Vitoria, the School of Salamanca) questioned the Crown’s title and the justice of conquest — an internal critique that nonetheless operated within the colonial project rather than ending it.
In their words
like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing… but the Massacre of these Wretches
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.