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Hispaniola

1494 – 1550 · na-hispaniola

Hispaniola is the Caribbean island now holding Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and it was the site of the first lasting European colony in the Americas. The encomienda system was designed here and then exported across Spanish America. Bartolomé de las Casas's accounts from the island provoked the first European debate on the legitimacy of the conquest and led to the Valladolid debate of 1550 — where the formal question was whether the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had souls and rights. That the debate happened is worth registering; that it changed practice very little, equally so.

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