Nicole Legnani's The Business of Conquest is an intriguing examination of the rhetorical constructions of law and empire in the Spanish Atlantic world. Legnani argues that conquest, although it had real consequences, was a type of fiction or artifice. She reads polemical texts by Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta, and others, as well as chivalric novels and legal documents such as the Requerimiento and contracts, within the framework of the “Capitalocene.” Drawing on the work of Jason W. Moore, she locates the origins of planetary destruction in the long sixteenth century and explores the anxieties created by economies of both moral and material values. Legnani is most interested in slippages and tensions between love (caritas) and greed (cupiditas) in what she describes as a joint venture between crown and church.
The Business of Conquest adroitly demonstrates how authors used contingency. They struggled to...
