Ideological Foundations of the dispute on the dominium and American indigenes’ natural rights

Abstract

The essay examines the history of the debates over the natural rights, what, in the language of neo-Thomism was called dominium, of the American Indians prior to the arrival of the Spanish. The author argues that for the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria and his heirs there was no reason to believe that, under natural law, the Indians were not in full and legitimate possession of the lands they occupied before the arrival of the Europeans, and that the conquest of the Americans were therefore illicit. He examines how this debate was conducted from the sixteenth until the eighteenth century and how, in the end, the only secure grounds which could be claimed were not ones of possession or of sovereignty but instead what Vitoria had called the right of “Natural society and communication”. This implied that territorial occupation of one nation by another was indeed illicit and that the only legitimate interaction between peoples had to free exchange. By making these claims the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century had, in fact made possible the later arguments for a necessary transition from territorial imperium to a global community based on trade.