Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana

The systematic treatise on the law of the Spanish Indies, written by a judge who spent eighteen years on the bench in Lima under a royal order to write down what he learned there. Its second book opens by naming the charge against Spain — that it enslaved the Indians — and answers it with law. The same book defends compulsory labour for the public good, so the answer and its limit stand on the same pages.