So far, the analysis has centered on how theologians and jurists from Spain and Portugal approached the question of slavery. In their examinations of enslavement across continents and contexts, ranging from the Morisco revolt in Spain to Mediterranean piracy and the Portuguese slave trade, Iberian thinkers shaped the juridical imagination of slaves and their position in society. The problem of slavery, as they cast it, intersected with broader questions of “human rights” and the boundaries of political power. The final part of this book, however, moves beyond the intellectual milieu of the European lecture halls. The following two chapters focus on writings by theologians, missionaries, and imperial administrators who penned their polemics in the Americas. The realities these thinkers encountered overseas, and the distinctly colonial issues they faced, left a deep imprint on their literary production.
Iberian intellectuals in colonial Peru confronted the troubling reality that formally free vassals were forced to work in the deadly mines of the Andean highlands. The treatment of Indigenous peoples resembled that of slaves rather than that of political subjects. The fundamental inequality between settlers and Natives posed both a conceptual and practical problem: it threatened the unity of the colonial body politic, and the countless deaths of Indigenous subjects undermined the very foundation on which the economy of the Spanish empire in the Americas was built.
Some European observers from the New World made analogous arguments regarding the transatlantic slave trade. Missionaries who witnessed the brutal realities of slavery firsthand emphasized the grave practical consequences of the Iberian imperial theorists’ justification of the trade in enslaved Africans. They cautioned that the exploitation of sub-Saharan Africans would ultimately be punished by God and jeopardize the stability of the empire—unless it was stopped immediately. By insisting on the incompatibility of slavery and salvation, these voices redefined the complex relationship between humanity, freedom, and the Christian faith. The final part of this book traces these debates about coercion and slavery, revealing novel understandings of what constitutes political relations.