I am immensely grateful to David Temin, Leila Ben-Abdallah, and Michael McNally for being willing to read and comment on Making All the World America. Each of the readers has very helpfully reconstructed, in terms often clearer than my own, the central argument of the book. In doing so, all three contributors to this forum have made explicit themes that I had hoped Making All the World America would raise for its audience.
There is too much rich material and commentary in each one of the responsesto address fully here, butI think that, generally speaking, Temin, Ben-Abdallah, and McNally have each in their own ways explicitly and implicitly asked for me to address the relationship between this book’s account of the early-modern development of the Doctrine of Discovery and native information and the philosophical, legal, and political dynamics which characterize the present state of relations between Indigenous peoples, colonial governments and international institutions, and national and global civil society more broadly. Temin, for example, has especially highlighted the question of “Indigeneity” in relation to my account of the invention of the native. Ben-Abdallah has similarly remarked on the absence of an account of the entanglement of the transatlantic slave trade in Black Africans with the Doctrine of Discovery, colonization, and the invention of the native. McNally, meanwhile, has asked where this book’s account of the relationship between the native and the Doctrine leaves the continued legal wrangling over the status of sovereign tribal nations’ lands and rights of self-government which flows out of the dynamics whose beginnings I have attempted to narrate. Answering these questions requires that I restate the book’s central conceptual problem and methodological approach before addressing them directly.
I undertook the research and writing that would become Making All the World America in an attempt to deal with a series of paradoxes I began to notice across accounts of the development of imperial political theories of international law and politics in the early modern collision between Christian Europe and the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere.
The standard critical narrative of the Doctrine of Discovery and the imperial political theologies that flowed out of it that has emerged by anticolonial and similarly-minded critics, especially over the past five decades, maintains that the Doctrine was singularly devised to eradicate every vestige of the Indigenous presence in the western hemisphere and to erect a wholly new civilization atop what it considered to be terra nullius (a legal principle which did not take hold in defense of the rights of discovery, it is worth noting, until the late nineteenth century). But if this was true, I wondered, why did the key agents and theorists of colonization, from missionaries and government officials to philosophers and theologians, spend so much time and energy writing about the Indigenous peoples whose existence we were told they violently wanted to wish away? Why did so many early colonies adopt and maintain “Native” place names, bastardized though they very often were? And how did this relate to the fact that there was a no doubt uneasy, but also undeniable tradition in imperial thought of advocating for the human rights of Indigenous peoples, from Antonio de Montesinos to Helen Hunt Jackson?
Earlier, less critical accounts of the “Age of Discovery” offered some historical possibilities of answering these questions but raised as many problems as they solved: If European-Christians were entering into a new, modern age of Discovery, how did they square the apparent triumphalism of that age with the cataclysmic realization that the world, in the most basic and material sense, was not as they had been taught it was for over two millennia? And if, in responding to those problems, “scientists” or “empiricists” like Thomas Harriot and John Locke and “humanitarians” like Montesinos and Las Casas can be said to have inaugurated a great tradition of empiricism or human rights in the West, where did those ideas come from and what was the purpose they were designed to serve in their immediate intellectual and institutional context? Neither the critical revision of the hegemonic myths of “Discovery” nor the more conservative but not entirely uncritical historical accounts of the period offered satisfying answers to these questions. Each, however, did offer certain tools that, when put together, might help in developing such answers.
Quentin Skinner famously argued at the end of the 1960s that political theorists desperately needed to become better historians in order to understand and interpret the concepts and texts they claimed a singular ability to understand and interpret. But history is, also quite famously, far from an ideologically-neutral practice, as Skinner’s mentor Herbert Butterfield keenly understood. It is also a practice of interpretation. It was with this in mind that it began to seem necessary to me to bring some of the methods and insights of intellectual history to bear on the criticisms of the formation of the modern world system that had been issued over the past thirty years in Indigenous, studies, post-colonial studies, and decolonial theory. At the same time, I wanted to bring some of those latter theoretical schools’ critical sensibilities to bear on the narratives of the emergence of early modern political thought that largely dominated intellectual history.
I had begun to sense, on the one hand, that accounts of the intellectual history of modern political theology remained somewhat parochial and therefore empirically incomplete and inaccurate, especially where these accounts attempted to address who and what constituted important influences, and sources of knowledge in the formation of early-modern ideas related to the imperial expansion of Europe into the Americas and beyond. This became abundantly clear, for example, when I re-opened my old copy of Locke and found it replete with references to Gariclaso de La Vega el Inca, and shortly thereafter found Cassique–an Anglicized Arawakan term theretofore used across the Spanish empire’s well-known (at least among Latin Americanists) attempt to incorporate some version of pre-Columbian social orders into the mechanics of Viceroyal government–to be a key office defined in the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolina Colony, which, again, Locke largely authored. But if these facts were to be taken seriously, I began to realize that this also meant that the standard assumption that theorists like Locke (or even, in his own way, Las Casas) were from the first “settler colonialists” with an eye toward “the elimination of the native” (or, in a related theoretical grammar, inherently “colonial” whose modernity obscured a darker underside of “epistemicide” and negation) needed to be revisited.
The research that followed led me to conclude that the native is not necessarily what colonial government and imperial theory always seeks to eliminate. Very often, and quite paradoxically, the native is what those forms of power seek to produce. The Doctrine of Discovery, and especially the way that it travelled from the Spanish to the English empire during the first two centuries of its development, seemed to constitute the legal and institutional case of this dynamic par excellence. And the politico-theological transformations–that is, the putative “secularization” of the origin stories that justified the emergence of particular kinds of state and states-system order–which depended on the Doctrine and its image of the native in a variety of ways seemed to me to demonstrate just how fundamental this practice was to the operations of the philosophical systems with which we continue to wrestle. At the same time, unfurling this story also began to reveal a hidden history of Indigenous intellectuals domesticating and contributing to key concepts of early-modern political theory.
These conclusions, I felt, had some bearing on the present, particularly where they had been assisted by recent criticisms of the politics of recognition and humanitarian reason in Indigenous studies and related fields. It was with this in mind that I decided to write an epilogue addressing historically-proximate (and thus possibly relevant to certain lines of critical scholarship) legal cases, thinkers, and contemporary cases, however briefly. But I did take the dangers of presentism seriously in conducting my research. I wanted, more than anything, to try to represent the strange, surprising, and often confusing nature of not only reading early-modern thought, whether enunciated by European-Christians or the original inhabitants of the Americas, but also those historical actors’ accounts of that strangeness, shock, and confusion. In this regard, I decided to only highlight the most obvious connections that I could discern to the present, leaving it up to readers to draw whatever connections between the past I was narrating and the present they were attempting to understand they felt were warranted and helpful.
It has been quite illuminating for me, then, to consider the contemporary connections that Temin, Ben-Abdallah, and McNally have each made with regard to this book’s largely historical account, and which they have asked after. Temin, for his part, has described the book as a “Provocation about Indigeneity” and has offered an exceptionally charitable, if still itself provocative and exacting reading of Making All the World America. It is tempting to reconsider the book’s main arguments through Temin’s eyes, particularly when he finds connections between the work of Reid or Viveiros de Castro and company. But I also must insist here that Making All the World America has next to nothing to say about the concept of the indigenous, and so even less about “Indigeneity.” This is by design: Early versions of the research for this book did intend to inquire into the invention of the category of the indigenous. But the more that I pursued this line of inquiry, the more that I realized that the emergence of the indigenous could not really be counted as a constitutive feature of the development of the Doctrine of Discovery, at least in the version of this history that I had chosen to tell. Instead, it became clear to me that the indigenous was an early and discarded artifact of the development of European nationalism, particularly in France and England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was revived by a surprising variety of actors in the context of empire, from French abolitionists to Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ revolutionary army in Haiti to, eventually, French colonial administrators in West Africa.
Both the early enunciations and later retrievals of the indigenous did, occasionally, intersect with the question of the native and the Doctrine of Discovery. During the writing of Making All the World America, though,those connections seemed too tangential, distracting, and demanding for both my own writing timeline and the narrative of the book, and so I decided to leave them to the side. I have since written and published some of my findings on the topic elsewhere, and I have more work on the topic forthcoming. Whether this has much bearing on “Indigeneity,” which I understand to be a largely late-twentieth and early twenty-first century discourse that engages in a good deal of phenomenological meditation, I will continue to leave up to readers. Whatever the case, and for whatever it may be worth, the way that I have begun to think of the relationship between Making All the World America’s account of the invention of the native and native information on the one hand, and the emergence of the indigenous on the other, is that the former can be counted as an examination of one or two aspects of a whole family of ideas related to the development of the modern politico-theological value of atavism and autochthony in the construction of early-modern nation-states, states-systems, international law, and the social and intellectual competitors of these.
A variety of related reasons led me to choose not to engage in an analysis of the complicated intersections between the transatlantic slave trade with the Doctrine of Discovery and its invention and reliance upon native information, a topic Ben-Abdallah suggests remains worth considering. I agree with Ben-Abdallah on this point, and were time and resources much greater, perhaps I would not have decided to leave these questions aside. But when I asked these questions while writing the book, they too began to entail complex answers which, it seemed, probably required an entirely different monograph to address.
Take, for example, Herman Bennett’s recent work, African Kings and Black Slaves, which was enormously influential in terms of its historiographic and heremeneutic sensibilities on Making All the World America:Bennett has very helpfully shown how the early encounters between European sovereigns, particularly the Spanish and the Portuguese, and those of the West African coastline in the fifteenth century were far more of a meeting of equals than we might initially be led to think. It is true that Pope Nicholas V’s first papal bulls of discovery were granted to Portugal’s desire to gain ecclesiastical warrant to, as 1455’s Romanus Pontifex puts it, “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.” However, as Bennett has shown, the intensification of contact between Africa and Christian Europe in the fifteenth-century in fact began as a complex mediation of evangelical encounter and diplomatic exchange undertaken by both Iberian and African sovereigns in some degree of equal measure. It was only later, around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the Iberian delineation of these “African Kings” paradoxically enabled the emergence of a perception of “Black Slaves,” a process which Cassander L. Smith has tracked in the growth of the English Atlantic empire in her Black Africans in the Early British Imagination.
Bennett insists that this story “calls into question the telos that has long served to absorb the African-European encounter and its immediate history into the story of New World slavery, thereby overlooking the part that Africa and Africans played in the evolution of Iberian sovereignty and imperial expansion before 1492.” Dealing with this argument, and the wealth of historical scholarship it is addressing, with the seriousness it deserves would therefore require a sustained comparative empirical and theoretical investigation ofthe whole complex of racial orders in the Atlantic world during the first two centuries of the development of the Doctrine and native information.
To do that work, one would have to begin from the fact that–as I briefly mention in Making All the World America–while the enslavement and slaughter of the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere caused a great deal of angst among European-Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, no such comparable angst seems to have emerged with regard to the transatlantic slave trade once it did get under way in earnest, at least until around the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, African enslavement was at least occasionally seen as a remedy for the former, as Las Casas’ infamous 1516 proposal to alleviate Taíno population collapse on Hispaniola by importing Black slaves as supplementary labor suggested. What is more, and returning to the question of the indigenous, all these matters would be further complicated by a series of confusing enunciations: In 1648, for example, the English polymath Thomas Browne was the first to explicitly refer to the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere as “indigenous” in categorical opposition to and as part of his effort to explain, as his essay put it, “The Blacknesse of the Negroes.” And the first colonized group of people to refer to themselves as indigenous were the aforementioned Armée Indigène of Haiti under the leadership of General Dessalines, who declared themselves as such in their announcement of independence from French colonial dominance in 1804. Maureen L. Daut has recently begun to think through the implications of this latter fact in relation to what Dessalines and his followers knew very well to be (hence the name of their new nation) the Indigenous past of the island they had just liberated. In short, dealing with this series of historical and conceptual problematics, it seemed to me, first required getting the story of the relationship between the native and the Doctrine sorted, in hopes that I would have an opportunity to make sense of these complex entanglements at a later date.
Many of the concerns related to McNally’s thoroughly erudite tour through the complexities of the continued effects the Doctrine has had on Federal Indian Law and Tribal Sovereignty in the United States in his response were indeed present in my mind as I wrote my book. I have found the scholarship of Robert A. Williams, S. James Anaya, Robert Miller, Maggie Blackhawk, and Steven Newcomb especially instructive on these issues. Not being a lawyer myself, I would direct readers to that body of work, as well as McNally’s own Defend the Sacred as well as Dana Lloyd’s Land is Kin to get some bearing in the immensely complex field of Native American law and Indigenous international law. Instead, I attempted to approach those concerns in my book through that uneasy intersection which Reinhart Koselleck has identified between social and conceptual history. And for that reason, I was perhaps most gratified to read that McNally found the book to cause him some productive disorientation. My sense of achievement here derives not from a perverse antagonism to the reader nor to the topic, but rather from the fact that, as McNally’s own documentary survey of a few of the most prominent issues in contemporary encounters between Tribal Nations and the US Supreme Court attests, the political dynamics of Indigenous-colonial relations remain maddeningly complex and contradictory. I wished to represent a historical example of such complexity and paradox as fully as possible in Making All the World America in order to provide at least some perspectival depth to the no doubt very different, but perhaps not unrelated, convolution and chaos in the present.
One could tell a story here about the period during which the book was written: I began research and writing as a graduate student in the galvanizing atmosphere of the early-2010’s crescendo of a series of Indigenous-led socio-spiritual, legal, and academic movements across Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and at the United Nations. And by the time I finished drafting the epilogue in the autumn of 2023, the backlash was underway against that brief period of still very frustrated and incomplete possibility, led by white-supremacist political parties, nation-state governments, and their oligarchical allies in those aforementioned countries and beyond. The dynamic of push-and-pull between anxious governments eager to square their high-minded claims to legitimacy with colonial institutions and practices, the actions and ideas of colonized populations, and the especially belligerent demands of those colonial groups actually leading the charge of expansion that Making All the World America describeswas meant to bring some of the complexities of the current moment into relief through both the difference and similarities of its historical account. But again, only remotely and tentatively so, and it is up to readers to interrogate and explore the connections I have suggested can be extended between past and present.
Perhaps the most profound, and haunting, problematic raised by the three readers in this forum to me is Ben-Abdallah’s reflection on the deeply politico-theological questions of shame as an act, guilt as an affect, and redemption as an aspiration. These questions remain, to my mind, dangerously underexamined in genealogies of modern political ideas, especially regarding the narration and critique of imperial history. Making All the World America’s insistence on confusion, complexity, paradox, and the unreliability of supposedly definite categories by virtue of the very history of their fabrication and use can be read, in its own limited way, as a means of addressing those questions, though much more remains to be said, and Ben-Abdallah’s own work promises to do so in urgently needed ways. Examining the function and effect of these important theological prerequisites and political passions critically would not necessary, and indeed must not, involve any kind of denial of culpability for the crimes of imperialism and colonial government. It would instead provide a more nuanced mapping of the psychosocial dynamics animating colonial relationships and imperial designs, between and within the different constituencies productive of such dynamics. It would also, therefore, help us to better understand the understudied long-term risks and probable outcomes of mobilizing that particular politico-theological energy.
These are surely incomplete and, in many ways, unsatisfactory responses to the many, many important questions Temin, Ben-Abdallah, and McNally have each raised. I can only thank them, and any readers of the book and this forum, for their patience and generosity in reading and thinking with Making All the World America.
