The colonial encounter posed two significant challenges to the universalist claims of Christendom. First, the presence of different European states with competing claims to colonial preponderance meant that both expansion into and rule over New World territories were ‘contested and open to rival inter-pretations’.9 Second, the confrontation with American populations called into question why the application of universal, natural laws diverged so sharply between the Europeans and Amerindians. There was a pervasive and
intractable contradiction between notions of Christian universality and the absence of any Christianity in the Americas. In this context, ‘claims to universal authority upon the old foundations of Christendom were, when looked at in this global perspective, as Hugo Grotius bluntly said in 1625, daft (stultum)’.10 Reconciling the facticity of unevenness in the context of the increasingly global scope of European activity required a rejection of imperial and papal concep-tions of legality based on universal divine law. Through this rejection, a new conception of universality was constructed which would prove central to the justification of colonial expansion.
The self-reflection this involved was made possible through a comparison between the Spanish and the populations of the Americas, and the attempt to reconcile the two under a universal framework applicable to both. The Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria – a forerunner in modern international law11 – based his legal thought on a characterisation of Amerindians which emphasised their supposedly ‘natural’ commonalities with Christians. Both peoples, Vitoria argued, were capable of ‘reason’. Like the Spanish, Amerin-dians displayed ‘orderly arranged’ polities in which rules pertaining to ‘marriage and magistrates, overlords, laws and workshops, and a system of exchange’ were observable.12 A shared possession of ‘reason’ consequently formed the basis of equivalence between Europeans and non-Europeans, binding both under the same – universal – legal framework.13 Vitoria therefore began reconstructing papal universalism on the secular basis of natural laws and the principle of jus gentium (law of nations) which, rather than being dictated by the papacy or emperor, would be administered by sovereigns.14
By treating the Spanish and Amerindians as ‘equal’ participants in the colonial system, Vitoria’s approach provided a system of law which legitimised the Spanish presence in the New World in terms of commerce and expansion.15 However, the specificities of Vitoria’s argument reveal a considerably more insidious underbelly, as his innovations in jurisprudence not only legitimised the unfettered penetration of the Spanish into the Americas but, moreover, provided a legal basis on which the coercion of local populations could be justi-fied.16 For despite the idealised conformity between Amerindians and universal principles of natural law, Spanish colonialists were all too aware that the colonial relationship between the two was marked by nonconformity and difference – an opposition among the local population to the Spanish ‘way of life’. As Beate Jahn argues, this eventually forced Spanish jurists to ‘grapple with an ontolog-ical rather than just a politontolog-ical or legal question: what was the nature of these Amerindians; were they human beings at all?’17
In the mid-16th century debates among Spanish jurists, a popular idea took hold that although Amerindians were indeed human, they were hamstrung by a developmental ‘backwardness’ – a ‘primitivism’ – caused by their own cultural peculiarities. Vitoria’s sociology of local populations in the Americas
thus served to identify those universal (read Spanish) qualities that the
‘Indian’ lacked. Hence, the absence of certain qualitative characteristics became constitutive of their very being as ‘Others’.18
Both Vitoria and the influential theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda were instrumental in identifying markers of ‘barbarian’, ‘evil’ and ‘savage’ characteris-tics among Amerindians.19 While sodomy and cannibalism were indicative of a heathen, diabolical, even bestial character (‘little different from brute animals’ as Vitoria put it),20 the physical nudity of the Amerindians exposed, in the minds of the Spanish, a more pervasive spiritual and cultural nudity, ‘an absence of customs, rites, religion’.21 Amerindians were also considered economically naïve, excessively generous and possessing no conception of private property, while appearing unable to properly extract precious metals or cultivate land.
The difference in systems of production, property and exchange observed by the likes of Columbus and Cortes served as markers of an absence of social system altogether, from which a view of the Amerindians as ‘backward’ was extrapo-lated.22 The upshot of such ‘observations’ was that the Amerindians were by nature and divine sanction destined to be slaves.23 As Sepúlveda put it:
those who are dim-witted and mentally lazy … are by nature slaves. It is just and useful this way. We even see it sanctioned in divine law itself, for it is written in the Book of Proverbs: ‘He who is stupid will serve the wise man’. And so it is with the barbarous and inhuman people [the Indians] who have no civil life and peaceful customs.24
Both Vitoria and Sepúlveda saw in the Amerindian character a series of defects, each a product of years of socialisation in ‘evil’ customs and practices, which prevented the Amerindians’ salvation.25 A long process of counter-education and supervision by the Spanish designed to ‘undo’ such ‘barbarity’ subsequently became a necessity, no less a duty.26 Moreover, because such ‘barbarity’ was so deeply ingrained, force, coercion, discipline and punishment became necessary to compel local populations to abandon their beliefs and customs.27 If ‘they refuse our rule’, as Sepúlveda wrote, ‘they may be compelled by force of arms to accept it’.28
The brutality of Spanish colonialism led another Spanish thinker, Bartolomé de Las Casas, to produce a ‘counter-history’29 of the Amerindians.30 He empha-sised their ‘gentle and peace-loving’31 characteristics, upon which he articulated a principle of Christian equality and ‘the natural laws and rules and rights of men’.32 Las Casas contrasted this image with that of the Spanish conquistadors as ‘devils’,33 thus criticising Spanish practices in the Americas. However, despite his more ‘benevolent’ starting point, Las Casas also saw Amerindian culture as something to be negated and replaced by Spanish practices, albeit ‘peace-fully’.34 In justifying this position, Las Casas argued that since Amerindians
were ‘docile’ and ‘less resistant’, they were particularly primed for conversion to Christianity.35
Here, Las Casas invoked a paternalistic conception of Amerindian devel-opmental immaturity – these people were ‘borne late’ and were hence ‘rustic’
in character. The ‘cultural vacuum’36 that characterised Amerindians would therefore have to be filled through tutelage from the more advanced Spanish.37 Hence, in both belligerent and benevolent sides of the debate, the conclu-sion was the same: both Spanish and Amerindians were subject to the same universal, natural laws, but because of a deeply ingrained cultural ‘backward-ness’, Amerindians were incapable of adhering to such laws. Since Amerindians were incapable of governing themselves, the Spanish were required to govern on their behalf. Spanish rule and tutelage was therefore necessary in order for Amerindians to conform to the ‘universal’ principles of natural law and ‘achieve salvation’.38
Associating ‘universality’ with ‘the adoption or the imposition of the univer-sally applicable practices of the Spanish’39 meant that colonisation and the aggressive transformation of the ‘New World’ were subsequently presented as moral and legal obligations. Should indigenous communities deny colonialists the ‘right of communication’40 through which the indigenous people would be transformed, the colonialists would be entitled to conduct a ‘just war’ against them.41 With this move, war became justified ‘under the cover of an interna-tional law of reciprocity’42 and took centre stage in the ideology of colonialism.
It became the ‘means by which Indians and their territory [were] converted into Spaniards and Spanish territory, the agency by which the Indians thus [achieved]
their full human potential’.43 In short, the destruction of indigenous communi-ties, customs and modes of production became reframed as the ‘humanitarian obligation of the Spaniards’.44 These ideas advanced by the ideologues of the Spanish Empire prefigure – if in incomplete form – the basic components of Eurocentrism to which we now turn.