Natural law’s open-ended rights of travel and conversion justified full conquest once resisted.

Evidence

Vitoria also managed, however, to arrive at a contrary conclusion by relying on that same natural law. This infinitely amenable law also provided that the rights of the Indian peoples had to adjust to the expansive rights of all other people, including the Spanish, to travel, trade, “sojourn” and, in the cause of Christianity, to proselytize. … When so resisted, however, they could be asserted to the full extent of conquest and dispossession. And so they were. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 223

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The same ‘natural law’ could both affirm Indian dominium and license their total dispossession — a legal system so elastic it pre-ordains the colonial outcome. This is a genuinely paradigm-shifting account of how colonial law works.
• XREF: Connects to the flexible, self-serving legal reasoning in the diamond trade’s extralegal regime — rules repeatedly bent to whatever serves power.