It is estimated that 90 percent of the native population of the Americas died between 1492 and the middle of the seventeenth century—a decline from sixty million people to six million—and that about thirteen million Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. Never before in world history had genocide occurred on the scale of continents, obliterating languages and cultures, cities and histories. More than anything else, Spanish and other European ideas of the New World propelled these irredeemably wrenching conquests.
