SOURCE: Muldoon, James. “The Mechanics of Political Evolution.” In The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 66-77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Muldoon traces how the seventeenth-century Spaniard Juan de Solórzano y Pereya argued that his country's conquest of the Americas could be justified only as a temporary measure to assist Native Americans evolve into the kind of advanced Christian society for which Spain provided the model.

Once Solórzano had demonstrated that the Spanish could not legitimately deprive the inhabitants of the New World of their dominium on the grounds that they were fierce and savage, he turned to a related issue: the possibility that the Indians should come under Spanish control at least temporarily because the Spanish were wiser and more prudent than the Indians themselves. This argument was rooted in the...