- Jan 2024
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moodle.davidson.edu moodle.davidson.edu
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More thus offers a succinct statement of occupied but uncultivatedland as “worthless,” as waste, vacant, empty, virgin, wilderness – as terranullius – that may rightfully be appropriated for productive use.
An explanation of terra nullius
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By the mid-eighteenth century the British were in need of allianceswith the Native nations because of the conflict with France.
To me this just proves the idea of ex post facto justification. These so-called savages became negotiable with once it became necessary to negotiate with them. Their claim to sovereignty was recognized only due to their ability to resist and be of use to the colonizing power.
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They planted themselves in the New Worlds to estab-lish their own civil societies and could do so because they were Englishand so already “civilized” beings
Recalling the ideas of the civillizing mission.
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Locke is very clear that a civil govern-ment is the only properly political form.
Governemnt is necessary for sovereignty. This once again feels tremendously ex post facto.
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First, after his well-known claim that it is gathering or hunting, that is, the labor involvedin appropriation, which creates property – God gave the world to “theuse of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title toit;)” (II, §34; 1988: 291) – Locke insists that the same line of reasoningapplies to the appropriation of land
Labor creates property, and because England's labor uses it more effectively it has the right of conquest. This actually kinda reminds me of the ideas of Henry George, wherein land is the only form of value which is in fact not created through productive labor due to its inherently limited nature, and that because of that it is the only form of property which can fairly be taxed.
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“theoryset the terms for many of the later theories that were used to justify theestablishment of European property in America”
I'm beginning to disagree with the thesis of terra nulllius as an overarching theory behind colonization. We've already seen a "intellectual convergence" towards the ideas, and that's because they're just so damn convenient. If you have overwheleming military and economic power over a foe, and are looking to justify a conquest of them, they will be dehumanized. Time and time again this has been proven. And once they are dehumanized, that land becomes empty, free for the taking. This imposition of the westephalian system is the true overarching theory behind colonialism, not terra nullius, a theory which simply repeats over and over again directly in philosophical justifications of conquest due to its convenience.
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gainst such men, as Isocrates says,war is made as against brutes
Dehumanization as a settler tool
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Thus judicial remedies cannotbe obtained and the individual writ of punishment runs in “a wilder-ness,” or “where there is no state”; that is to say, in a terra nullius.
Tying the settler idea back to the idea of terra nulliius, where this treatment is justified due to this original status of the land. It also started to make me wonder though about back-reasoning? Like to me this colonization existed as an economic endeavor originally, and all of the legal and moral justifications are ex post facto. This idea of terra nullius, of a place where law doesn't apply due to the status of natives, is interesting, but not useful or sufficient, except as to recognize where similar ideas are being used, and even then recognition of true goals should be sufficient.
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n De Jure Belli Grotius states that the law of nature allows anyone“of sound judgement who is not subject to vices of the same kind or ofequal seriousness” to inflict punishment
The law of nature is natural and is only stopped when formally superseeded in the settler's eyes.
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[o]ur American plantations” were obtained either bytreaties (i.e. agreement) or “by right of conquest and driving out thenatives (with what natural justice I shall not at present inquire)” (1899:Intro. §4, 96).
America was conquered or diplomatically annexed, two of the Westephalian ways of lawful territorial exchange, though with a people who were unfamiliar with that system.
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