Defending indigenous sovereignty helped legitimate colonial dispossession
Evidence
The ambivalence of Vitoria could hardly be more pronounced. He is almost invariably received as the benign humanist who erected a basic defence of Indian sovereignty and title to their lands and fathered international law. Yet in doing both these things he provided a consummate legitimation for one of the more spectacularly rapacious of imperial acquisitions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 221
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to the broader theme in this reader’s corpus about how ‘benign’ institutions and discourses legitimate extraction — e.g. Milgrom’s law merchant as institutions enabling trade, and library history’s print ending reader autonomy.
- SEED: An essay angle: the double-move by which granting a right simultaneously legitimates its violation — how humanitarian framing historically underwrites rather than checks dispossession, from Vitoria to contemporary ‘responsible extraction’ discourse.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that defending sovereignty was itself a form of imperial legitimation is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion, dense enough to sit with for days.