We invited three scholars to comment on Timothy Bowers Vasko’s Making All the World America: Native Information and the Doctrine of Discovery (University of Pennsylvania Press). Vasko was part of the Political Theology Network’s Emerging Scholars in Political Theology program, and he developed material for the book with that community. His book is situated at the intersection of political theory, Native American studies, and religious studies.
His publisher writes, “Making All the World America offers a new account of the ideological framework undergirding early modern imperial expansion: the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that the first arrival of a European power among the lands and peoples of the Western Hemisphere granted the right to govern the regions that they claimed to have ‘discovered.’ While scholars have maintained that the doctrine operated through the suppression of Indigenous peoples, Timothy Bowers Vasko contends that, on the contrary, the doctrine’s ideological work actually depended on the recognition of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Between 1492 and 1690, the Spanish and English architects of the doctrine sought to justify European-Christian empire through the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into colonial frameworks as religious, political, property-owning subjects.”
