Colonial power could be asserted through theatrical legal documents rather than force.

Evidence

(Compare, in this regard, Napoleon’s tactics in Egypt with the tactics of the Requerimiento, a document drawn up in 1513-in Spanish-by the Spaniards to be read aloud to the Indians: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses [the King and Queen of Spain] may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey,” etc. etc.68) When it seemed obvious to Napoleon that his force was too small to impose itself on the Egyptians, he then tried to make the local imams, cadis, muftis, and ulemas interpret the Koran in favor of the Grande Armée. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209

Categorization

• XREF: The Requerimiento echoes the performative-textual legitimation of conquest that echoes across later readings on bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion — a paper ritual granting moral cover for violence. — connects to: TRIPS functioned as a political document rather than an economic or legal one. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 200
• QUESTION: The Requerimiento as a speech act performed before an audience who could not read it — worth chasing the scholarship on Read Aloud as a juridical instrument of conquest.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209