Bartolomé de las Casas y el paradigma biopolítico de la modernidad colonial

Abstract

Analyzes the emergence of colonial biopolitical thought in a series of projects by Bartolomé de las Casas developed between 1515 and 1521 regarding the depopulation of Hispaniola and the other Greater Antilles (1503-1516), the legal attempts to moderate labor exploitation ( 1511-1514), of the Cisnerian reform of the government of the Indies, its failure and its debate (1516-1518) and the Carolinian project for the colonization of the northern coast of Tierra Firme (1518-1521). What has been traditionally seen as a utopian and humanitarian moment in Las Casas' thought, corresponds, according to the authors, to the emergence of a modern concern for the life of the population as a problem of political economy, the object of calculations and interventions. of government. The extractive model of mining and the encomienda work system during the first three decades of the colonization of the Indies produced a demographic crisis in the Greater Antilles and threatened the existence of the overseas kingdom. Las Casas proposed several reform plans consisting of alternatives to the processes of instrumentalization and exhaustion of life. The clergyman imagined that a good government would replace the misgovernment of the Indies; that the king and his colonial agents would be in charge of indigenous recovery and repopulation, and the promotion of production; and that the growth of people and fruits would result in many and "perpetual incomes." Las Casas came to propose a system of encomiendas without encomenderos directed by royal officials, Indian hospitals, refugee camps, policies for the protection of children and the promotion of miscegenation, agricultural diversification of the economy, and even a colonization plan directed by himself in which he would transplant Spanish farmers to the New World who would live in peace and trade with the Indians. Between 1515 and 1521, Las Casas imagined a biopolitical colonialism, which would “humanitarianly” exploit indigenous life, taking into account its conservation and reproduction; a colonialism that would fill the earth with people, the king's coffers with wealth and Christendom with souls. In trying to negotiate the salvation and cultivation of the life of the population with the tasks of expansion and exploitation, biopolitical thought found its own limits. This book deals with this heterogeneous biopolitical project, its deep contradictions and its resounding failure.