With all its attendant cruelties, justifications, critiques, and regrets, Spanish colonizing was a narrative of the conquest of peoples living in civil societies. The narrative of English colonizing is one that progressively banishes existing inhabitants to the margins of its consciousness by denying their civic capacity, their sociability. In the English narrative the indigenous become brutes, in whose place the colonizer first desires, then actively imagines, an empty landscape to populate anew.

An extract from Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound (2010).