The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century

Juan de Solorzano Pereira (1575-1654) was a lawyer who spent eighteen years as a judge in Peru before returning to Spain to serve on the Councils of Castile and of the Indies. Considered one of the finest lawyers in Spain, his work, De Indiarum Jure, was the most sophisticated defense of the Spanish conquest of the Americas ever written, and he was widely cited in Europe and the Americas until the early nineteenth century.

His work, and that of the Spanish School of international law theorists generally, is often seen as leading to Hugo Grotius and modern international law. However, as James Muldoon shows, the De Indiarum Jure represents the fullest development of a medieval Catholic theory of international order that provided an alternative to the Grotian theory.

Author: James Muldoon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 05/29/1994
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780812232455

About the Author
James Muldoon is Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University, Camden.