The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other

At its core, Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America argues that the success of the Europeans in conquering America was due to their conception of “otherness,” which gave them the mental distance required to manipulate reality and subjugate the native population. Todorov doesn’t quite prove his thesis, but along the way he draws on fascinating first-hand accounts of both Columbus’s discovery of America and the Spaniards conquest of Mexico and Central America. These accounts are drawn from the diaries, letters, and logbooks of a variety of participants — Las Casas, Diego Duran, Pedro de Valdivia, and Columbus himself.