"Mill"'s larger point isn't Cortés; it is that the Spaniards correctly ended a damnable civilisation. But "Mill" - from Abbott - must impose some constraints upon that. Cortés apologists typically wave off that he was "no saint". You know the debating-technique from the opening movements of The Shawshank Redemption; the aim is to get you, dear reader, also a sinner; to identify yourself with the wretched, imperfect soul in the dock; or with the victim of the crime, in that movie's case.
Restall, although mostly concerned with debunking the hero-worship of the last century's Abbotts, also makes comments about the Spaniards involving themselves in genocide. I've done my share of mistakes, but I've not done that. For Federalist readers, I can't speak...
Restall admits that Spain (and Portugal) hadn't quite learnt the racial theories of the nineteenth century (to that, The Federalist has your boilerplate Dems R Reel Rayciss article on Calhoun) - nor even of the seventeenth. But - he argues - they were getting there.
I think Restall's right. David Goldenberg's Curse of Ham still holds up, on the Mediterranean nations' template on racial theory, prior to Darwin. Spaniards were a beleaguered minority in Mesoamerica; they tended to stick together, and to see the rest as outsiders. It was natural that the Spaniards abroad would categorise Native Americans as alien.
Europeans before modern science have vacillated between seeing these continents as "the fourth part of the world", and as an extension of transIndian Asia; some have thought the "Indios" were tribes of Israel. For our purposes, we care only about Conquistador rhetoric. I notice that the Conquistadors didn't invoke "Ham". Instead, I notice that "Sodom" crops up. If a Christian (or Muslim) invokes that, it is like a Jew invoking Amaleq.
The Spaniards did see all the New World natives as a different race, they did destroy Mesoamerican civilisation, and they did murder many natives in the process (along with kidnap and rape).
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