Born in Blood and Fire

The forward move on to the American continent was the work not of princes or capitalists at home in Europe, but of gold-hungry frontiersmen spurred on by the rapid exhaustion of the islands’ deposits. Without the short-lived gold rush on the Caribbean islands and the nearby Tierra Firme, the impetus towards the territorial conquest of the mainland

In return for the pillaging of their lands, the suppression of their independence, and the destruction of their local economies, the colonized peoples were to be given the gift of “civilization.”

To keep Europe’s industries running, the colonized lands were rushed toward modernization. European ideals of secularism, pluralism, individual liberties, human rights, and, to a far lesser degree, democracy—the wonderful legacy of the Enlightenment that had taken hundreds of years to evolve in Europe—were pressed upon the colonized lands with no a

In the words of Hans Koning, “There now began a reign of terror in Hispaniola.” Spaniards hunted American Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked: [The Indians] all promised to pay trib