This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim.
Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.

Most histories of European appropriation of indigenous territories have, until recently, focused on conquest and occupation, while relatively little attention has been paid to the history of treaty-making. Yet treaties were also a means of extending empire. To grasp the extent of European legal engagement with indigenous peoples, Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 looks at the history of treaty-making in European empires (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and British) from the early 17th to the late 19th century, that is, during both stages of European imperialism. While scholars have often dismissed treaties assuming that they would have been fraudulent or unequal, this book argues that there was more to the practice of treaty-making than mere commercial and political opportunism. Indeed, treaty-making was also promoted by Europeans as a more legitimate means of appropriating indigenous sovereignties and acquiring land than were conquest or occupation, and therefore as a way to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. As for indigenous peoples, they engaged in treaty-making as a way to further their interests even if, on the whole, they gained far less than the Europeans from those agreements and often less than they bargained for. The vexed history of treaty-making presents particular challenges for the great expectations placed in treaties for the resolution of conflicts over indigenous rights in post-colonial societies. These hopes are held by both indigenous peoples and representatives of the post-colonial state and yet, both must come to terms with the complex and troubled history of treaty-making over 400 years of empire. Empire by Treaty looks at treaty-making in Dutch Colonial Expansion, Spanish-Portuguese border in the Americas, Aboriginal Land in Canada, French Colonial West Africa, and British India.

This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.

Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonisation, an ideology which legitimised colonisation for centuries. Assimilation and Empire shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons, but was also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation was found in the combination of two powerful ideas: the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms they valued and wanted to realise in their own societies, but which did not yet exist. Saliha Belmessous examines three imperial experiments - seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth and twentieth-century French Algeria - and reveals the complex inter-relationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonised nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection - articulated through the progressive theory of history - been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonised and coloniser, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.