5 - From Infidels to Savages: Empires of Commerce and Natural Rights

Summary

How did European thinking about interactions with peoples of the Indies move from Christian-infidel relations to an identifiably modern form of international relations? This chapter explores the preceding question by looking at the emergence of Protestant empires during the seventeenth-century and the ascendant neo-Stoic Christian legal humanism structuring new ideas of world order and providential commerce. It considers the growing ideological displacement of the legal category of the infidel, and the associated crime of idolatry, in the political context of the Indies, East but especially West. This chapter also addresses normative ideas about the savage that developed in the infidel’s wake. Although there were important differences between the Iberian empires and the new English and Dutch empires, there were also continuities. This chapter considers those similarities between Spanish religious thinkers and representative international thinkers on natural law and the law of nations such as Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Purchas, New England Puritans, and John Locke. What does the colonization of North America look like in light of Valladolid’s legacy from a century earlier?