Modern colonial discovery replaced mythic and religious justification with racism and legalism

Evidence

Whilst the racial, and racist, basis of the doctrine of discovery is a modern innovation, the doctrine owes much to its premodern forms and ethos. The finding and settlement of putatively unknown lands has long been attended with mythic and religious justification and with rituals of appropriation, all of which strikingly resemble modern practice. Similarity in this case, however, serves to dramatize difference. What marks modern discovery of the occidental variety, the subject of this present paper, is the displacement of the mythic and religious by a combination of racism and legalism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the doctrine of discovery debate in contemporary US/Canadian indigenous land law, and to the ‘crown title’ legal fictions built on it.