The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Revised)

Description

A classic in its field, The Conquest of America is a study of cultural confrontation in the New World, with implications far beyond sixteenth-century America.
The book offers an original interpretation of both Columbus’s discovery of America and the Spaniards’ subsequent conquest, colonization, and destruction of pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico and the Caribbean.
Using sixteenth-century sources, the distinguished French writer and critic Tzvetan Todorov examines the beliefs and behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and of the Aztecs, adversaries in a clash of cultures that resulted in the near extermination of Mesoamerica’s Indian population.
A new foreword by Anthony Pagden discusses the implications of Todorov’s landmark study.