Mind 77enslaving had the right to take all the land and compel its former inhabitants to
work for them.
Had it not been for King Philip of Spain, this quasi-Aristotelian justification
for the dispossession of South American Indian peoples would have been long
forgotten, a small footnote in colonial rationalizations of conquest and theft. In
1550, alerted by his legal experts to disagreements about the question of Indian
rights to their lands, the Spanish king authorized a formal public inquiry – the first
Royal Commission to deal with indigenous peoples. The inquiry took the form of
a debate. On the one side was Sepulveda, very much the theorist: he had never set
foot in the new colonies. He advanced the idea that these new peoples were ‘nat-
ural slaves’ and therefore had no rights that could restrict the claims of Spain’s con-
querors and settlers. The other side of the argument was entrusted to Bartolomé de
Las Casas, a monk who had spent 30 years in South America and lived close to
indigenous peoples there. He had been among agricultural, imperial societies – not
the hunter-gatherers of Amazonia – and he had been surprised by complex and, in
many ways, familiar kinds of social institutions. Las Casas had written extensively
about his experiences, arguing that the Indians of the colonies had systems of law
and administration, as well as ideas of property and morality, that should be
respected. The debate lasted almost two years; the king of Spain then took 18 years
to decide which argument he would accept. In 1568 he gave his support to Las
Casas’s point of view. Meanwhile, of course, Spanish policy and practice had been
ruthless: Indians were deemed to have neither land rights nor souls. Some were
enslaved, many were killed, and their lands were appropriated. Neither the sophis-
tication of the Indians Las Casas described nor the vigour of the public debate in
Seville moderated the conviction, shared by colonists and Christian missionaries
alike, that these people had not yet reached the evolutionary level of real human
beings.^2
On the settlement frontiers of the North American colonies, the question of
the Indians’ humanity was also raised. If the indigenous occupants of the lands to
which settlers were moving were not humans, but roamed, rather, ‘as beasts of the
field’, then they had no right to resist the new Americans’ ‘manifest destiny’ to take
and use all new-found lands.
It is easy to see that an insistence on people’s being something other than, or
less than, human has been inseparable from the wish to occupy their lands. Doubts
about an unquestionable right to appropriate land did effect some challenge to the
theory of colonial expansion: legal justifications were sought to defend claims to
new territories. At the frontiers themselves, however, colonists at times killed hunter-
gatherers as if they were animals. Colonial governments licensed these murders
by turning a blind eye, sometimes even condoning them as a suitable response to
the ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’, whose want of humanity made them a threat to set-
tlement. History records Aborigine hunts in Australia, the killings of Bushman
families throughout southern Africa, attacks on the tribes of Amazonia, and relent-
less campaigns against the Indians of the American West. Early in the 19th cen-
tury, the philosopher Hegel observed that the development of the American West