This book is the latest in what is so far a trilogy. The first two were Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature (Lexington, 2017), and The Formation of Latin American Nations (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Thomas Ward is a very erudite Latin Americanist who also has wide knowledge about Latin American indigenismos, their literature and languages, sometimes a very rare combination. The book is made up of five chapters. The first is a study of the pre-history of slavery in the Americas among ‘Amerindians’, which created the social-political-economic soil on which European slavery could grow and flourish. The second deals with what has been called the ‘theological-political paradox’ of Western political philosophy as it related to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. This paradox refers to the issue of whether religious persons and organisations can or should exert any political power, i.e. give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. Ward demonstrates eloquently how this paradox was a thorn in the side of the violent evangelisation of Abya Yala (the Americas). The third focuses on the distinction between natural (Aristotelian influenced) and social (Renaissance and humanistic) slavery. It is noteworthy that Christopher Columbus, for instance, did not espouse a naturalistic view of slavery, and that most Latin American, criollo and Indigenous thinkers of the sixteenth century embraced a social view of slavery, i.e. one brought about by social factors, such as war, and not as genetic or natural. The fourth deals with Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More, their reciprocal influences, and how they had been impacted by the discovery of the so-called New World. The final chapter focuses on Bartolomé de las Casas and Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. These four thinkers are treated as exercising what Ward calls ‘liberation thinking’ and laying down the grounds for what would eventually become the twentieth century's theology of liberation. These thinkers, furthermore, personified the challenges of what Ward calls the ‘long sixteenth century, from around 1492–1616 [which] marked one of the most substantial cultural transformations the world has ever known’ (p. 1). This reviewer could not agree more.

The year 1492 marked the launching of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the ‘capitalist world system’; and the onset of what Enrique Dussel called the European ‘modernity project’, with its ‘ego conquiro’; and the start of what Alfred Crosby called ‘the Columbian exchange’; and thus, as some (including this reviewer) have argued, the beginning of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, Ward also introduces the notions of ‘the psychosis of coloniality’ (p. 10) and ‘epistemic coloniality’ (p. 12), thus aligning himself with what we today call ‘the decolonial turn’, or ‘decoloniality’, as both a method and a practice. Therefore, this book should be read as contributing to the ‘decolonial’ paradigm that emerged from Latin America and Latinx thinkers in the United States in the last three decades, or half a century if we consider what we can call the ‘epistemic insubordinations and revolutions’ that gave us the theology, philosophy, pedagogy, psychology and sociology of liberation in Latin America. There is so much to learn from this rich book, and we ought to be grateful for Ward's scholarship and commitment to liberation thinking and the decolonial method. This text exemplifies what we could call ‘decolonising’ colonial history and the Renaissance. Thus, it is also an elucidation of what I would call the ‘dialectics of coloniality’, in which we are still, and for the foreseeable future, entangled. At the very least, we walk away with the thought that the Renaissance was entangled with Abya Yala, and not solely an intra-European movement. Yet, the book sometimes reads like a Sherlock Holmes investigation with little and only very circumstantial evidence. Erasmus and More interacted, although to what degree we do not know. Whether they read or were aware of de las Casas is also up for grabs, and that these three may or may not have influenced Guamán Poma de Ayala is also very suspect and unsubstantiable. Nonetheless, Ward shows how they were part of a constellation of ‘liberation thinking’, and shared an ‘elective affinity’ for liberation.

As a way to contribute to Ward's project, I would add the following, rather than critiques of his erudite work. First, the ‘decolonial’ paradigm is neither homogeneous nor monolithic. There is a spectrum of positions: from Mignolo, through Dussel, Quijano, Lugones, Maldonado-Torres, Grosfoguel, to Castro-Gómez; that is, from the metaphysical and analectical, to the historical, to the historicist and genealogical. This spectrum opens up venues of argumentation and approaches. Second, as Dussel has argued in numerous writings, 1492 marked the beginning of modernity, and the emergence of a counter-modern discourse, of which de las Casas is perhaps the most, but not the only, exemplary thinker. Decolonial thinking is a critique of the de-temporalising tricks of the discourses of modernity. Modernity did not begin with the Reformation, Renaissance and the eighteenth-century revolutions (French and American, without mention of the Haitian), but with the conquest/invention of ‘America’. Third, Ward has tagged de las Casas and Guamán Poma de Ayala as proto-thinkers of liberation thinking in the Americas. Therefore, we could have expected more attention to them in this text. Ward has identified de las Casas’ The Only Way text as exemplary of liberation thinking. This is indeed a major text by de las Casas, re-written and edited over the span of his life, and surely one of the great texts of the counter-discourse of modernity, as Dussel has argued. This is a major treatise that, unfortunately, has been neglected by most scholars, notwithstanding its ecumenism, pacificism, enlightened rationalism, prophetic and apostolic stand, and profound respect for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It can be argued that it surpasses anything we can read in Erasmus, More, and even Kant and Hegel. Here, I would direct readers to the work by Ramón Valdivia Giménez, who teaches theology at San Isidoro de Sevilla. Lastly, Ward focuses on Guamán Poma de Ayala's Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1615–16), a work that is as sprawling as it is unsuspecting, for it is as much an apologia for the ‘true’ Catholic Church as it is a meta-Christian argument about how peoples of the Andes had already inherited the true gospel before the Spanish set out to evangelise the peoples of Abya Yala. The book in its most authoritative edition is made up of three volumes. Yet, this so-called ‘epistle’ is also a genre-bending text, written by someone who was clearly literate but not educated in the early seventeen-century standards. Given that this text is so little known in the English monolingual world, Ward could have spent more time on it, rather than on More's Utopia, which is better known. Finally, I wish Ward had spent more time untangling colonial psychosis and epistemic colonialism, which seem to refer to two different maladies, one seemingly affecting individuals, the other cultures. Be that as it may, this is an important work, part of an encyclopaedic corpus.