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Explores the ambivalent legacy of indigenous peoples' natural rights articulated by Europeans in Spanish and English colonial contexts. It will appeal to scholars of religion, law, international relations, Latin America, history, and politics interested in early modern religious and legal arguments for the dispossession and freedom of Amerindians.
List of contents
1. Introduction. International relations beyond Westphalia; Part I. The New World Crucible of Infidel Rights: 2. Theocratic world order and religious wars; 3. Spanish Dominicans and the 'affair of the Indies'; 4. The politics of natural law at Valladolid, 1550-1551; Part II. God, Empires, and International Society: 5. From infidels to savages: empires of commerce and natural rights; 6. The scholastic law of nations, native occupation, and human solidarity.
About the author
David M. Lantigua is Assistant Professor of Moral Theology and Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He was previously a faculty member at The Catholic University of America and was a former graduate fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He co-authored, with Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics, 2nd edition (2011). He is also co-editor of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents (2020), part of the Atlantic Crossings series.
Summary
Explores the ambivalent legacy of indigenous peoples' natural rights articulated by Europeans in Spanish and English colonial contexts. It will appeal to scholars of religion, law, international relations, Latin America, history, and politics interested in early modern religious and legal arguments for the dispossession and freedom of Amerindians.
Additional text
'The dark truth about conceptions of human rights is that they have been used both to include and to exclude those deemed worthy of membership in the human family. Infidels and Empires in a New World Order exposes the ways in which theological understandings of the distinct rights of infidels within Latin Christendom provided a key - and inadequately recognized - conceptual model for the rights of native peoples in the New World, sometimes in order to legitimate their political dispossession, but also, importantly, in order to defend their religious and political freedom over against imperial ambitions. In shifting our attention away from the Peace of Westphalia to theological debates that took place more than a century earlier at Valladolid, Lantigua's study makes a vital contribution to a more adequate understanding of the complex character of early modern international law. Jennifer A. Herdt, author of Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition
