The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539-1689

Abstract

As the nations of Western Europe began to colonize the Americas, they created a discourse to justify the activity, devel oped from the legal codes of the same classical past that provided the fictional model the activity. The law was the ancient Roman ius gentium, which regulated commerce and contracts, dealt with relations between states, and was often a synonym the vaguely philosophical ius naturale?normative precepts of natural reason valid all peoples and places. The fiction was Virgil's Aeneid,1 the story of the foundation of the Roman Empire by the Trojans. Still popularly regarded, at the dawn of the sixteenth century, as actual history, Virgil's story had been retold often enough, and applied widely enough (from Britain to Bohemia, Iceland to Sicily), to make it possible to elaborate the Trojan origin of every European people, to the disper sion of the arts and sciences, and to provide an etymology of illustrious antiquity every place name.2 The presumed history of Trojan descent did not merely account for the arts and sciences of Western civilization by deriving them from a single, long-destroyed source. It also defined what constitutes civilization itself (settled agriculture and cities: tilling the earth, building walls and towers on it) as opposed to its opposite, savagery (dispersed nomadism: hunting and gathering in forests). For all us speakers of what B. L. Whorf called Standard Average European languages,3 which derive civility from the city (civitas), sav agery from the woods (silvestris), and all forms of from the act of tilling the soil and dwelling in a fixed place (colo, cultum), Virgil's epic is our founding legend. What gets founded is an empire and its colonial outposts, which entails the bringing of culture to the indigenous inhabitants of the place where the empire builders will plant their fields and their metropolis. Virgil describes this mythic moment as it occurred on the seven hills of Rome: