“THE CONQUEST OF THE EARTH,” wrote Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.” Although Conrad wrote these words about the Belgian Congo in the nineteenth century, he could just as easily have been describing the first few decades of Spanish rule in the Americas. It was certainly “not a pretty thing.”
