Many fragile folios of Indian tribute records have been turned and manhandled by scholars anxious to get a fix on how many Indians there were in the New World. Many of the Indians enumerated on the margins of those folios ended up on the floor of their documentary repository as flakes of paper, impossible to count again and lost forever. Much ink has been spilt and spent on the magnitude and meaning of the destruction of the Indians. The catastrophe and its historiographical debate have now lasted half a millennium and still haunt the world.
Massimo Livi Bacci, professor of demography at the University of Florence, breaks down the individual components of the debate, and then in a tour de force of synthesis he explains the disaster in terms that will anchor academicians and engage the general public in search of viable conclusions. Historians will profit greatly from this well-researched...
