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Book contents
- Infidels and Empires in a New World Order
- Law and Christianity
- Infidels and Empires in a New World Order
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: International Relations Beyond Westphalia
- Part I The New World Crucible of Infidel Rights
- 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
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Scholastic Law of Nations, Native Occupation, and Human Solidarity
from Part II - God, Empires, and International Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2020
- Infidels and Empires in a New World Order
- Law and Christianity
- Infidels and Empires in a New World Order
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: International Relations Beyond Westphalia
- Part I The New World Crucible of Infidel Rights
- 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
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In view of seventeenth-century Protestant humanist transformations, this concluding chapter returns to the Spanish Dominicans and their scholastic-juristic view on the law of nations as a normative resource for thinking about international society. Their Thomistic attention to the rationality of the universal law of nations as positive human law enabled political recognition of non-European polities, the lawful occupants of the Indies. This contrasted with an imperial-humanist jurisprudence that provincialized natural law and the law of nations under European civilizational hierarchy to justify dispossession of inferior peoples. The chapter especially charts the evolution of Las Casas’s thinking through his interaction with the theologians at Salamanca. His eclectic synthesis of Thomistic theology, canon law, Roman law, and humanism to buttress indigenous occupation exemplified a radical scholastic brand of legal humanism that complicates static ideological categories in the history of international legal thought. By placing Las Casas in conversation with his Dominican confreres, a normative view of the law of nations grounded in Christian theological convictions emerges. It accounts for the independence and interdependence of all peoples, and the indispensable role of justice and solidarity in promoting world order under a Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbors.
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- Infidels and Empires in a New World OrderEarly Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought, pp. 251 - 323Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020