Bartolomé de las Casas was working on his Historia de las Indias by 1551, recording the violence of Spanish conquest and colonisation. His writing drew on eyewitness experience and moral outrage. It challenged triumphalist imperial narratives by centring Indigenous suffering and Christian responsibility.

Las Casas influenced later protest literature, anti-colonial argument and poetic depictions of the New World. His prose also shows how testimony could become a literary form when official histories ignored conquered peoples.