Nicole Legnani’s The Business of Conquest plays on the double meaning of the common Spanish expression Las empresas de conquista. On the one hand, the expression refers to the deeds of conquistadors, battling adversity, the elements, and the so-called barbaric inhabitants of the New World. On the other, it refers to what we today call a business, a practice of economic profit through plunder, exploitation, and commercialization of natural resources. However, as Legnani points out, the seemingly straightforward connection between empresa and conquista for contemporary readers is the result of an epistemological and economic transformation in the sixteenth century that united, in contradictory fashion, empresa as “an activity with a purpose,” or “activity to an end”—available both to knights and laborers—(50) with profit-driven negocio or business. The business of conquest, in that sense, represents the tense union of individual heroic deeds, which are still to be finished, such as the colonization of vast lands and diverse peoples, and “events that have ended” (51), actions that have already yielded their profitable return.Based on this fundamental contradiction between closed action and open-endedness, Legnani’s innovative and sophisticated argument proposes that the conquest of the New World followed a venture capitalist structure for two main reasons: not only was it based on a series of general and limited partnerships––the Spanish Crown and Genovese or German bankers in partnership with individual entrepreneurs and wealthy merchants, for example—, it was also fundamentally supported by an open-ended, profit-driven activity “with no closure either for the Indigenous peoples of the Andes or for their invaders” (7). This activity, as Legnani describes insightfully, multiplies more than goods for trade, exploitative labor, and money. It also reproduces figurative concepts, such as cupiditas and caritas, as narrative tropes that coexisted in fraught relationships of signification.To this complex argument of paradoxes and juxtapositions, Legnani superimposes another significant analytical layer in which the actions performed during the empresa carry with them the mark of a subjective identity engaged in self-reflection. The Business of Conquest, therefore, also engages in important considerations of how the people performing the activities of conquest perceived their role through relationships of production that tried, with great effort, to reconcile inherent contradictions between material and spiritual profit. These contradictions, Legnani argues, are directly tied to the way double-entry bookkeeping juxtaposed profits to obligations and long-term performance against that of other merchants. In this regard, Legnani astutely includes in her analysis the economy of salvation, highly appraised by encomenderos, missionaries, letrados, and indigenous peoples alike, who closely examined these “spiritual profits” (156) in relation to the exploitation of labor and land appropriation produced by the conquest. The marks of subjective introspection are expressed, for instance, in relaciones, letters, ordenanzas, and chivalric accounts, in which the terms of the business partnership were explicitly defined, along with the perceived participation in, or contribution to, the larger narrative of empire. Additionally, subjective introspection also appears in indigenous petitions, missionary, juridical, and theological treatises, as well as historical accounts that grappled with the devastating consequences of the economy of salvation.The Business of Conquest, consequently, examines an impressive array of colonial texts covering many different types and functions. In chapters two and three, for example, Legnani treats the well-known Carta a Santángel allegedly by Columbus, the infamous proclamation of Requerimiento, the business contracts or Ordenanzas of 1526 and 1573, Fernández de Oviedo chivalric novel Claribalte, and the anecdote of Bartolomé Perestrello as retold in Historia de las Indias by Las Casas. Chapter four, in turn, discusses the conflicting views of Las Casas (De vocationis modo) and Acosta (De procuranda) concerning the question of the value of neophyte indigenous souls within the business of conquest, while chapter five delves into the 1560 petition to King Philip II, in which the Curacas of Peru attempt to participate in their own conquest by purchasing a modicum of sovereignty. This ambitious exploration of such a broad array of dissimilar texts constrains Legnani to gloss over some engaging readings, most notable the episode of Félix’s shipwreck on Fire Island during the discussion of Oviedo’s Claribalte (116), and Bartolomé Perestrello’s “pregnant doe rabbit” (123) in Las Casas’ Historia de las Indias. It is not entirely clear how these two passages convey the thought-provoking discussion on the relationship between the “scalability” of the venture capitalist model of the conquest, and the “way in which this form of colonizing capitalism blurs the distinctions between things and beings” (133).That being said, the analyses of Las Casas’ and Acosta’s “political theology,” as well as of the curacas’ attempt to carve out a space for themselves within this colonizing capitalism, is focused and acute. In particular, Legnani offers an intriguing assertion that the curacas’ submission of past indigenous practices as possible solutions or alternatives to predicaments of the conquest constitutes, ultimately, a commodity to be bought or sold. The past is a commodity only if inert and unproductive, yet paradoxically revived as the promise of future possibilities (186). This paradox of past marketed as future, similar to the contradiction between the closed and open-ended character of the business of conquest, may help to explain that the failure of letrados like Acosta to “place contingency and providence in conversation” (27) is a consequence of the contradictions of capitalism itself. In that sense, the providential narrative of the Spanish empire, adorned with loving violence, paternalistic authority, and a “civilizing” ethos, prevails because of —not despite—the tension it brings to the variable circumstances of conquest.Legnani contributes a new framework for assessing the colonization of the New World beyond primitive accumulation, or the accumulation of wealth through dispossession—Marx’s starting point for capitalist production– by arguing convincingly that this unique empresa involved the commodification of human experience not only through labor, but also through the practices of situating yourself in the world and codifying your interpersonal relationships. The exception that inhabited terra incognitae represented is perhaps not the opposite of the globalized world of today, where there seems to be no “outside” of capitalism, but a necessary and ever-present limit that defines the way capitalism operates as it colonizes more and more areas of human experience (Big Tech comes to mind as a relevant example). As Legnani’s stimulating questions at the end of the epilogue indicate, perhaps many of the so-called insurgents and outlaws of today belong to the tradition of colonizing capitalism and “partnerships for profitable violence” (223).