Lines of Amity

Abstract

Abstract One of the abiding fictions underwriting the history of international law is the idea of lines of amity, the premise that territorial conflicts, acts of piracy, and other forms of extraterritorial violence that took place west of the Canaries and south of the Tropic of Cancer, did not infringe on interstate treaties or otherwise affect the amity among European states. Chapter 3 explores an alternative framework for the lines of amity, examining the ways that interstate competition in the Americas enabled unexpected alliances, forms of amity that traversed lines of nation, confessional identity, and race. Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons in Panama in 1572 forges modes of amity that not only traverse colony and metropole but additionally complicate the extent to which nonstate agents and stateless persons could wield political agency in the unstable political domain ‘beyond the line’. An examination of Vitoria’s De Indis reveals the means through which the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination, a transformation accomplished through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register. Vitoria transforms amity from a model of similitude and alliance to a defence of Spanish colonialism under the guise of diplomacy, free trade, and the defence of the innocent. Finally, Davenent’s The History of Sir Francis Drake rewrites Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons in order to provide a spectacular precedent for representing England’s nascent imperial identity, ensured through entrance into the Spanish Caribbean.