Charles II was certainly not the first Spanish monarch to be drawn to the writings of Iberian imperial theorists. Already in the sixteenth century, Francisco de Vitoria’s critical examination of the justice of the Spanish conquest in his solemn lecture “On the American Indians” (De indis, 1539) drew the ire of the emperor himself. Charles V (1500–1558), addressing his complaint to the prior of the monastery of San Esteban in Salamanca, where Vitoria resided, wrote: “certain religious masters of your house have debated and treated in their sermons and lectures the right we have over the Indies, the islands and firm lands in the oceanic sea”.1 On matters of empire and slavery, the writings of early modern Spanish and Portuguese thinkers were politically explosive.
Before embarking on the task of reconstructing this strand of imperial theorists, I would like to outline how the book’s approach relates to historical accounts provided by other scholars. The best-known figures among the Iberian theorists are Francisco de Vitoria and his fellow Dominicans at the University of Salamanca. While earlier scholarship focused primarily on their accounts of natural slavery, more recent histories tracing the ideological origins of European imperialism feature the Salamancan thinkers more broadly.2 Central to these approaches is an appreciation of the language of natural law that the early modern theologians and jurists inherited from Aquinas. In their understanding, natural law was imprinted in the minds of human beings to such an extent that it was reason itself. It provided the basis for human beings to act morally and set the terms for individual freedom.3 But it also served as the conceptual framework through which Iberian theorists—both the Dominicans at Salamanca and later Jesuit thinkers—sought to understand the political and juridical world around them.4 Based on this observation, Annabel Brett has provided a powerful re-evaluation of the significance of the Catholic natural law discourse for the emergence of the modern, man-made state with respect to both nature and the interpolitical arena transcending the commonwealth.5
A body of law closely related to, yet distinct from the law of nature was the ius gentium or “law of nations”, a concept rooted in Roman law. Traditional scholarship on the ius gentium celebrated figures like Vitoria as progressive founders of international law.6 More recent scholarship, however, has shown that the early modern ius gentium was embedded in a narrative of biblical history quite at odds with the principles of modern international law.7 For Iberian theologians and jurists, its principal function was to reconstitute the natural telos of humanity in the postlapsarian state.8 In their account, in Eden, earthly possessions had been held collectively by all human beings. But after the Fall, the ius gentium was introduced to regulate the establishment of private property, distinct commonwealths, wars and—most importantly, for the purposes of this study—slavery. The complex relationships between the pristine and the fallen world, and between natural law and the ius gentium, have been studied extensively. Above all, scholars have focused on the political implications of the interplay between the notion of dominium—which signified both human liberty (under natural law) and mastery or ownership of external things (under the ius gentium)—and the concept of right.9
The ius gentium was also central to the Iberian theorists’ engagement with the questions of conscience arising from economic dynamics in the wider Iberian world. It shaped their understanding of human contracts in such a way that interpersonal exchange was conceived primarily as an exchange of rights over things, governed by the principles of commutative justice. The Iberian impulse to interrogate the morality of trade has since become a point of interest for an entire scholarly tradition that views the early modern thinkers as forerunners of modern economic theory. As Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson observed in her 1978 monograph on Early Economic Thought in Spain: “[t]he Spanish Doctors made a useful contribution to the progress of value-theory”.10 Four years earlier, notably, Friedrich von Hayek had likewise underlined the significance of “the Spanish Schoolmen”, describing them in his Nobel Prize Lecture as “remarkable anticipators of modern economics”.11 Even today, this view remains far from obsolete. As the theologian Diego Alonso-Lasheras has recently argued, “studies of the last 40 years have helped to establish the importance of the scholastics in economic thought and particularly their influence on Adam Smith and modern economics”.12
Most scholars arguing along these lines note that it would be mistaken to treat the early modern theologians as “pure economists”, conceding they were equally motivated by their duty to guide people’s conscience.13 And yet, early modern adherents of Aquinas are still considered worthy of study because they anticipated the emergence of modern economic theory.14 Such readings, however, are anachronistic and misrepresent the core of early modern Iberian thinking. Spanish and Portuguese theologians understood economics as a sphere of concrete human agency that “was not seen as a reality abstracted and apart from the actions of individuals”.15 To understand early modern writings on justice, rights, and contracts, it is critical, therefore, to acknowledge that these texts were deeply concerned with the salus animarum, or the salvation of souls.16 As Wim Decock has shown, the ultimate framework through which theologians and canon lawyers measured individual agency in an economic world was the forum conscientiae, or the forum of conscience. When they theorized notions such as the “just price”, they did so in fundamentally moral terms.17
This emphasis on conscience also shaped how the Iberian imperial theorists envisioned politics. Historians have emphasized the importance of the Spanish and Portuguese “voices of conscience” in offering political guidance to the Iberian kings, both in domestic affairs and in imperial contexts.18 Martti Koskenniemi, by contrast, shifts the focus back to the horizontal plane of inter-individual exchange. “The real Spanish contribution” of Vitoria and his colleagues, as Koskenniemi puts it, was their creation of an “empire of private rights”—a language of private property rights that served to legitimate European domination over the non-Western world.19 In this reading, Vitoria and those writing in his vein are worthy of study, not because they advocated Spanish jurisdiction overseas, nor because they anticipated modern economic theory, but because they laid the conceptual foundations of what we now call capitalism.20 Yet a further, third, perspective challenges this exclusive focus on interpersonal exchange, highlighting instead the interplay between the horizontal plane of individual rights and the vertical plane of political authority. As Annabel Brett has shown, property was itself implicated in the language of the common good.21
However, with a few notable exceptions—above all the work of Carlos Alberto Zeron and Giuseppe Marcocci on Portuguese slavery in West Africa and Brazil—a sustained study of Iberian visions of enslavement remains strikingly absent from recent scholarship.22 This book seeks to address this lacuna. It demonstrates that slavery was the quintessential prism through which Spanish and Portuguese imperial theorists reflected on the relationships between rights and power, rulers and subjects, and commerce and politics.
1 The Iberian Imperial Theorists in the History of Slavery
The Iberian imperial theorists drew a sharp distinction between servitus naturalis and servitus civilis. In their view, only the latter governed the loss of human freedom and the process of enslavement, as the following chapters will show. The meaning of natural slavery, by contrast, is far more difficult to pin down. According to Anthony Pagden’s influential argument, Vitoria not only rejected natural slavery as the legitimate legal basis for Castilian domination over the newly “discovered” peoples in the Americas, but ultimately also abandoned this category altogether. Vitoria, Pagden argues, “effectively destroyed the credibility of the theory of natural slavery as a means to explain the deviant behaviour of the Indian”.23 Vitoria was indeed cautious to decouple the notion of natural servitude from the legal discourse associated with civil slavery. As Brian Tierney has shown, however, Vitoria nevertheless did not fully relinquish the idea. The decisive point, as he argues, was that “Vitoria was envisaging a status for those who were servants by nature radically different from the chattel slavery of ancient Greece and Rome”.24
But what, precisely, was that status? In the De indis, a lecture Vitoria delivered before Salamanca’s most illustrious intellectuals in 1539, he argued that Indigenous people in the New World were perhaps “so close to being mad, that they are unsuited to setting up or administering a commonwealth both legitimate and ordered in human and civil terms”, and indeed, “unsuited even to governing their own households”.25 If the “barbarians” truly lacked the capacity for political self-rule, Vitoria suggested, “[i]t might therefore be argued that for their own benefit the princes of Spain might take over their administration, and set up urban officers and governors on their behalf, or even give them new masters, so long as this could be proved to be in their interest”.26 In the end, Vitoria remained ambiguous, stating he did “not dare either to affirm or condemn” this line of reasoning.27 Equally important, he made clear that natural slavery, understood in this way, was not a legal status and had nothing to do with owning another person as private property.28 And yet, he left open the possibility that framing Indigenous people as “natural slaves” might justify the Spanish presence in the New World under the guise of political protection and guardianship.29
Other contemporary Iberian thinkers like Domingo de Soto—also a Salamancan—were less ambiguous and contested this sort of reasoning.30 Theologians and jurists writing from the New World, however, prominently revived the notion of natural slavery, with all its inherent ambiguities. For some, it served as a justification of the conquest, in that it sanctioned the imposition of Iberian authority over peoples like the “Caribs”, who were perceived as having failed to form proper commonwealths.31 But first and foremost, I will argue, the concept resurfaced in a new debate that was no longer about the legitimacy of conquest but about Spain’s model of imperial rule overseas. Jurists like Juan de Matienzo (1520–1579), university theologians like José de Acosta (1539–1600), and missionaries like Juan de Silva deployed the idea of natural slavery to justify forced labor imposed on Spain’s Indigenous vassals in the Americas.32
In the writings produced in Iberia the notion of natural slavery ultimately functioned as a foil for introducing another kind of slavery: servitus civilis. As a juridical rather than a natural category, civil slavery was a specific type of property right established by the ius gentium. The question of how one could fall into servitude thus centered on what the Iberian theorists called “legitimate titles”, a set of legal arguments for slavery. The principal titles included enslavement in “just wars”, selling oneself or one’s children out of necessity, and enslavement imposed as a punishment by public authority.
Scholars have made several valuable observations regarding Iberian accounts of slavery. We now know, for instance, that the canon lawyer Diego de Covarruvias played a foundational role in shaping the Iberian theorists’ understanding of “just war” slavery;33 that the theologians Domingo de Soto and Luis de Molina disagreed over whether voluntary slavery was permissible in the absence of necessity;34 and that Molina maintained that slaves, despite their status as “human properties”, could nonetheless own property rights themselves.35 These points will be revisited in more detail in the chapters that follow.
Among the Iberian imperial theorists, Luis de Molina, who offered the most comprehensive discussion of slavery, warrants a more detailed introduction. Born in Cuenca in 1535, he began studying law at Salamanca at the age of sixteen but dropped out just a year later to join the Society of Jesus.36 This marked a decisive moment in Molina’s life that would shape the trajectory of his future academic career. Although the Jesuits had slowly begun to establish a presence in European universities in the 1540s, they had yet to gain this status at the leading Spanish institutions. In Portugal, however, King João III (r. 1521–1557) entrusted the Society of Jesus with a college of its own at the University of Coimbra in 1542, which soon emerged as a leading hub for Jesuit education.37 Little wonder, then, that Molina was sent to Coimbra, where he studied philosophy, subsequently embarking on a second degree in theology, and eventually obtaining his doctorate in that subject in 1562. Accordingly, Molina has been characterized as “a Spaniard of Portuguese formation”.38 He remained in Portugal after completing his studies, holding a double professorship in theology and philosophy at Coimbra before accepting a prestigious chair in theology at the University of Évora in 1568. Molina held this position for over a decade until his increasingly declining health forced him to resign from teaching in 1583. He died in Madrid seventeen years later.
Molina is best remembered for his controversial intervention in a theological debate on divine foreknowledge. In his Concordia of 1588, he attempted to reconcile the Augustinian notion of grace with human liberty by coining the notion of “middle knowledge” (scientia media).39 Equally successful was his treatise on justice and right, De iustitia et iure, that went through more than ten editions across Europe in the early 17th century.40 This treatise is largely based on Molina’s lecture courses on Aquinas delivered at the University of Évora in the 1570s and 80s. The multivolume work became available in its entirety only after Molina’s death and was published between 1593 and 1609.41 And it is this work on justice and right that is most important for understanding his political and legal thought.
A range of recent studies, emanating mostly from outside the Anglophone academia, has centered on Molina’s extensive account of slavery in the De iustitia et iure.42 However, several issues remain unresolved in existing scholarship. The few accounts attempting to contextualize his understanding of enslavement draw rigid contrasts between him and earlier Iberian Dominicans. In so doing, they gloss over some of the crucial legal underpinnings of slavery, above all the complex interplay between the various senses of dominium central to Molina’s and other Iberian thinkers’ understanding of slavery—human freedom of action, rights over external things, and power over others.43
What is more, the vast majority of studies offer little more than an exposition of Molina’s treatise on slavery, merely recounting his arguments and celebrating the singularity of his comprehensive appraisal of the Portuguese slave trade.44 Yet to fully assess the political and legal dimensions of Molina’s work, it is crucial to not only put him in dialogue with his contemporaries but also combine the reconstruction of his thought with a critical analysis. Otherwise, the historian’s voice risks becoming indistinguishable from the language of early modern texts—and reproducing, rather than examining, their arguments. Precisely this problem lies at the heart of Jesús María García Añoveros’s study of early modern Iberian attitudes toward slavery: “We interpret the sources as they were interpreted at the moments and in the periods that they were used”, he notes bluntly, “excluding any possible modern interpretations of these texts”.45 Buying into the early modern rhetoric is presented as a historical approach, when in fact it constitutes a political move, one that blocks off a critical examination of the role Molina and other Iberian theorists played in the ideological justification of slavery and empire.
The third and final historiographical problem centers on Luis de Molina’s place in the history of antislavery thought.46 In 1974, Frank Costello was among the first to argue that “Molina opposed the slave trade and was a highly articulate critic of it”.47 Half a century later, while Molina’s acceptance of the validity of slavery has been largely recognized, the view advocated by Costello remains an important impetus in recent studies. The basic line of argument is that “deep inside”, as it were, Molina was a fierce critic of slavery and sought to get rid of this institution, though he never actually managed to do so.48 Even serious scholars like Matthias Kaufmann, who maintain that such a view is problematic, insist that Molina was “on the road to abolitionism” and point to his “indirect role” in that development.49 It is therefore unsurprising that Molina is also cast as a critical voice in general histories of slavery and abolition, including by scholars like Manisha Sinha.50 But a close reading of Molina’s text, especially when considered alongside the arguments of his predecessors, reveals that he actually expanded the moral and legal latitude for trading and owning enslaved people.51 As I will argue, Molina should not be counted among the early critics of slavery.
This brief overview of the historiography connecting Molina and slavery reveals both misunderstandings and unresolved questions. This situation is emblematic of the broader condition of scholarship on slavery in Iberian imperial thought. It is vital to stress, however, that numerous Spanish and Portuguese thinkers, writing both before and after Molina, have been almost entirely forgotten. Intellectuals such as Miguel de Palacio, Estevão Fagundez, and Diego de Avendaño all wrote extensively on the subject—and with political weight, as we saw in the letter from the Council of the Indies to the Spanish monarch. Yet their names remain largely absent from the stories we tell about their era.
One explanation for this neglect is that many Iberian imperial theorists wrote in Latin without ever being translated into modern European languages (let alone a non-European one). Another lies in the handbook style of their texts. The Iberian thinkers structured their writings into different thematic clusters, frequently repeating the fundamentals of justice and right at various points in these volumes. The resulting redundancies may seem tedious. But they are a real treasure trove for historians: they allow us to bring into dialogue various thematic strands so as to identify tensions and ambiguities within these writings. For in fact, the Iberian thinkers not only cited their contemporaries and other authorities extensively, they also constantly cross-referenced passages in their own works, revealing a self-imposed commitment to argue coherently. And it is precisely where inconsistencies occur in the thinking of the Iberian imperial theorists that we find some of their most intriguing arguments—and instances where they compromised their own conceptual architecture in the face of present political needs.
2 Slavery, Empire, and Global Intellectual History
As will be clear by now, the history of rights and slavery in the Iberian world is in many ways a global history. In his 2016 book on the subject, Sebastian Conrad provides both a general introduction to an increasingly popular field and his own interpretation of it.52 He acknowledges the revisionist impulse of global history, especially its attack on “container-based paradigms, chief among them national history”.53 At the same time, he rightly cautions that global history is not simply a synonym for histories that study the entire planet. For him, it is a distinct analytical lens through which to view the past, “like gender history or economic history”.54 Conrad, in other words, understands global history as a perspective that sharpens the historian’s analysis of certain processes, networks, people, ideas, or events.55 “As important as the quest for alternative spatial units may be”, he argues, “the real challenge consists in shifting between, and articulating, different scales of analysis rather than sticking to fixed territories”.56 For Conrad, focusing on a continuous dialogue between micro- and macro-historical views allows us to transcend “such dichotomies of structure and agency, of necessity and the contingent”.57 His contribution is valuable for intellectual history in that it invites a focus on individual agents—whether theologians, jurists, or missionaries—so long as they are situated in the broader intellectual, social, and political world they inhabited.
But how exactly have intellectual historians engaged in the so-called global turn? It is noteworthy that the phrase “global intellectual history” has been invoked as the title of both an important essay collection and an emergent academic journal.58 In the introductory contribution to the former, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori discuss a set of avenues that intellectual historians might wish to explore.59 Their “gallery of alternative models” explores the potential of global historical methods such as comparative approaches, or an attention to networks and processes of translation, for historians of ideas.60 For David Armitage, one of the leading proponents of this field, the need for going global hinges on the fact that most human beings on the planet experienced their present as subjects of empires rather than states.61 What is more, this spatial extension is linked up with an expanded temporal perspective in Armitage’s view. His understanding of global intellectual history is tied to a call for reviving the longue durée, connecting disparate historical episodes and epochs through what he terms “serial contextualism”.62
However, as Frederick Cooper warns in one of the essays in Moyn’s and Sartori’s collection, an overemphasis of the global carries significant risks. By focusing only on “unbounded connections but not the greater array of those [dimensions] that are border crossing but finite”, Cooper warns that we risk defining a field “in artificial terms”.63 Cooper’s reservation is not only due to what may be lost in a process that privileges global breadth at the expense of local depth. More importantly, he argues that to redescribe imperial intellectual history as global intellectual history is problematic, as not all imperial discourses are properly global. In Cooper’s view, retaining the notion of empire intentionally prevents an uncritical adoption of a universalizing and Eurocentric notion of globality.64 Other intellectual historians, too, have expressed their concerns about championing the global.65 When invoked uncritically, as Shruti Kapila maintains, this locution all too easily assumes the status of “a mere politically acceptable version of the ‘expansion of Europe.’ ”66 She further argues that this danger looms large in the work of those who endorse a “spatially literal view” that is “by definition always from above” and therefore “absorbs distinction and ignores disruption in favour of replicable and coherent patterns across contexts”.67
If we return to Sebastian Conrad’s fundamental insistence that global history should be understood as a perspective rather than simply a replacement of one container (the state) with another (the world), we might approach the matter from a different angle. Other scholars have also pushed in this direction. Rather than searching for “ideal-types of political-spatial configurations and their significance”, Lauren Benton argues that it is more beneficial to focus instead on “repeating problems taken up by political writers and [to] analyze their approaches in attempts to address those problems”.68 Benton emphasizes the central role of the commonwealth or state in recent global histories of political thought because, in the early modern period and beyond, it “continued to sit beside or partially constitute other configurations of political community”.69 Indeed, the theologians and jurists examined in this book understood “empire” in ways not always clearly differentiated from other forms of political community. In reflecting on the problem of slavery, the Iberian theorists also considered the circulation of “human goods” in other spaces, such as the domain of the pope or the sphere of Roman law—spaces that were not equivalent to commonwealths governed by princes. In this sense, the book takes its cue from Benton’s assertion that it is particularly fruitful to study “the tension between spatial representations of political community and ideas about the spatial distribution of authority”.70
And yet, the call for more global intellectual histories is also a call to engage with past political languages that did not originate in Europe. The task of navigating between “language-worlds” and reconstructing non-Western “systems of thought” on their own terms is daunting, as the late John Pocock remarked, given the breadth of linguistic and cultural knowledge it requires.71 Nonetheless, he encouraged historians to undertake this challenge to win back what had, in his view, been lost in the shift from earlier Eurocentric histories of political thought to approaches solely concerned with economic relationships and power plays.72 Pocock sought to carve out a space for global histories before the age of economic globalization as much as he wished to preserve a place for politics in an age defined by commercial society.73
The fact that language poses a challenge for global history has also been noted by other historians. As Jeremy Adelman provocatively put it in his widely read essay of 2017, “it is hard not to conclude that global history is another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into a cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues”.74 Adelman struck a nerve with his critique of the cultural and symbolic dominance of history-writing in the English language. But his polemic is only partly applicable to students of the early modern world. That this book is written in English does not therefore mean that it overrides the language of any “Other” in the conventional sense. Quite the contrary, it recovers texts originally written in some of the most important global linguae francae of the 16th and 17th centuries. Not all those languages remain in active use anymore, quite unlike the tongues and cultures of the so-called “Global South” that Adelman has in mind. Latin, the language of more than half of the writings under scrutiny in this book, is effectively a dead language that makes translation unavoidable. Yet far from imposing English on the world at large, the process of reconstructing forgotten ways of talking about rights and power serves to reveal the historical contingency of our own conceptual frameworks about these issues—and to unsettle the “language world” that we inhabit.
It is also critical to avoid drawing a rigid contrast between “Europe” and the so-called “non-Western” world.75 In the “interpolity zones” where power and sovereignty were fragile or absent altogether, agents of European empires were in constant dialogue and negotiation with representatives of other polities.76 Scholars have shown that “Native claims” had a profound impact on these colonial encounters.77 Moreover, recent work by legal historians has demonstrated that political and legal theories that are traditionally considered “European” were significantly shaped by imperial realities. Famous tracts by thinkers like Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) not only responded to domestic issues but also to concrete circumstances on the fringes of early modern empires.78 Indeed, socio-legal historians have made significant—even if not always acknowledged—contributions to the field of global intellectual history.79 These studies underscore a crucial dimension of global histories more broadly: namely, the significance of paying attention to developments in the world “out there” that transformed discourses and realities “at home”.
It is not least in this sense that the present study approaches early modern Iberian accounts of enslavement from a global intellectual historical perspective. Many of the issues that the Spanish and Portuguese thinkers grappled with were urgent, practical problems of the day that demanded authoritative resolution. Portuguese missionaries in Brazil, for instance, faced the thorny question of whether enslaved Africans could be re-married if their spouses had been left behind on the other side of the Atlantic—and none other than Luis de Molina shared his opinion on the matter with some of the highest representatives of the Society of Jesus.80 What is more, in their discussions of the Portuguese slave trade in Africa and Asia, Iberian theorists drew extensively from travel narratives and eyewitness accounts to assess what could be deemed just or unjust.81 And as we shall see in the following chapter, Spanish and Portuguese subjects were themselves routinely taken captive by Muslims in the Mediterranean, and one vital question was whether those enslaved among the “Saracens” could, in good conscience, flee their captivity.
Emperor Charles V’s letter from 10 November 1539 is edited in Getino, El maestro fray Francisco de Vitoria, 150: “Venerable padre prior del monasterio de santisteban de la cibdat de salamanca yo he sydo ynformado que algunos maestros religiosos de esa casa han puesto en platica y tratado en sus sermones y en repeticiones del derecho que nos tenemos a las yndias yslas e tierra firme del mar oceano”. Vitoria’s De indis was a so-called relectio, a solmen lecture in which Vitoria pondered current affairs that were related to themes of his ordinary lecture course on Aquinas’s Summa. All fifteen special lectures held between 1527 and 1543 are available in a complete critical edition based on the surviving manuscripts of scribes: Vitoria, Relecciones jurídicas y teológicas, ed. and trans. Fernández-Largo et al. An English translation of the De indis is available in Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Pagden and Lawrance.
See e.g., Benton, They Called It Peace; Tellkamp, “Introduction”; Pagden, Burdens of Empire, ch. 1; Benton and Straumann, “Acquiring Empire by Law”; Lupher, Romans in a New World, ch. 2; and Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, ch. 2.
See Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, ch. 4; Deckers, Gerechtigkeit und Recht, ch. 3; and Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, ch. 2.
The relationship between earlier Dominican and later Jesuit theologians and jurists has been the subject of debate among historians of political thought. In his Natural Rights Theories, Richard Tuck emphasized a sharp contrast between them (54). But in The Rights of War and Peace, Tuck revised his earlier stance and instead underlined the continuities between Iberian Dominicans and Jesuits (68). More recent scholarship has pushed in this direction, while also showing that there were nevertheless important differences between individual Dominican and Jesuit thinkers. See especially Brett, Changes of State, passim; and Decock, Theologians and Contract Law, 65–66. The present study takes its cue from these latter studies. Importantly, this also means that, in contrast to Harro Höpfl’s treatment of Jesuit political thought, the focus in the present work is not on the general “Jesuit” label but on the thought of specific intellectuals, and on the respective continuities and discontinuities between them and earlier Dominicans. See Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought.
See Brett, “Scholastic Political Thought and the Modern Concept of the State”; and above all Brett, Changes of State. The story that Brett tells tacitly resists the idea of placing the Iberian theorists in a binary framework between “absolutism” and “constitutionalism”, as suggested in Burns, “Scholasticism”; and Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State”. More importantly, Brett also challenges the notion of a clear-cut Catholic/Protestant divide in the early modern natural law discourse that is advocated in Tuck’s Rights of War and Peace. Brett’s potision is also echoed in more recent scholarship. See e.g., Malcolm, Useful Enemies, ch. 11; and Grant, “Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili on the Juridical Status of Native American Polities”.
See e.g., Brown Scott, The Spanish Origins of International Law. On the uses of Vitoria by Brown Scott and other interwar legal scholars, see Amorosa, Rewriting the History of the Law of Nations; and Rasilla del Moral, In the Shadow of Vitoria, ch. 3.
There is, however, a debate between scholars engaged in so-called “critical histories of international law” and historians of political thought on the validity of approaching Vitoria’s thought, in particular, through the early 20th-century interpretation by James Brown Scott. For an excellent account of this debate; of the misconceptions that guide some of its participants; and of how many scholars who are writing global legal histories today in fact fruitfully draw on perspectives from the history of political thought as well as social history, see Benton, “Beyond Anachronism”.
Kirstin Bunge offers a helpful metaphor in speaking of the ius gentium as having a Scharnierfunktion, a hinge function, between natural and civil law. See Bunge, Gleichheit und Gleichmass, 268.
See e.g., Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, ch. 4; Brett, Changes of State, chs. 2–4; Seelmann, “Selbstherrschaft, Herrschaft über die Dinge und individuelle Rechte in der spanischen Spätscholatik”; Scattola, “Die weiche Ordnung”; and Tellkamp, “Rights and Dominium”.
Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 98. The so-called “Austrian” tradition of the history of economic thought contributed extensively to the establishment of this approach. See especially Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ch. 2; and von Weber, Wirtschaftsethik am Vorabend des Liberalismus.
Hayek, “Lecture to the Memory of Alfred Nobel”.
Alonso-Lasheras, Luis de Molina’s De Iustitia et Iure, 5. For a similar argument, see MacGregor, Luis de Molina, 210–216 and 225; and Azevedo Alves and Moreira, The Salamanca School, 73 and 85.
See e.g., Barrientos García, “El pensamiento económico en la perspectiva filosófico-teológica”, 119–120.
Other recent, forceful accounts in this regard include Popescu, Studies in the History of Latin American Economic Thought, ch. 4; Gómez Camacho, Economía y filosofía moral; Chafuen, Faith and Liberty.
Idoya Zorroza, “Some Reflections on the Ethical Rationality in the Economic Theory of the School of Salamanca”, 90, original emphasis.
Duve, “Kanonisches Recht und die Ausbildung allgemeiner Vertragslehren in der Spanischen Spätscholastik”.
Decock, Theologians and Contract Law. For a helpful overview of early modern contexts of conscience more broadly, see Braun and Vallance, “Introduction”. On the notion of economic justice in early modern Europe, see Trivellato, “The Moral Economies of Early Modern Europe”.
See Marcocci, A consciência de um império; and Reinhardt, Voices of Conscience.
Koskenniemi, “Empire and International Law”, 32.
Koskenniemi, “Empire and International Law”, 28.
Brett, “Luis de Molina on Law and Power”. See also Benton, They Called It Peace, 96–97. Meanwhile, Martti Koskenniemi has come to adopt a more balanced view of Iberian thinking that also addresses war and political power. See Koskenniemi, To the Uttermost Parts of the World, ch. 2. For a contrasting view that insists on a clear-cut separation of property rights from the language of vertical power in the later Jesuit Iberian theorists, see Tellkamp, “Francisco de Vitoria and Luis de Molina on the Origin of Political Power”.
Zeron, Ligne de foi; Marcocci, A consciência de um império, chs. 11 and 12. Also worth mentioning are Francisco Cuena Boy’s studies on the influence of Roman legal doctrines in early modern Iberian arguments about slavery, now collected in Cuena Boy, De servitute. Piqueras’s recent Derecho antiguo y esclavitud moderna focuses solely on legal norms and rules, and as noted above, he confines his analysis of Castilian and Mediterranean slave laws to the medieval period, while treating the early modern period exclusively through the lens of Spanish American contexts.
Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 104.
Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 270. Tierney first articulated his critique of Pagden’s reading of Vitoria in his earlier and less familiar essay “Aristotle and the American Indians”, 311–315.
Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 3, a. 8, 290, original emphasis.
Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 3, a. 8, 290.
Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 3, a. 8, 290–291.
See Vitoria, De indis, in Political Writings, trans. Pagden and Lawrance, q. 1, a. 6, 251.
According to Carlos Alberto Zeron, Vitoria thus regarded natural slavery as an “attenuated” form of political domination to be distinguished from a “truly legitimate title” of conquest (see Zeron, Ligne de foi, 397). On the relationship between empire and arguments of protection more broadly, see the contributions in Benton, Clulow, and Attwood (eds.), Protection and Empire; and in Haug, Weber, and Windler (eds.), Protegierte und Protektoren.
Soto, DIEI, lib. IV, q. 2, a. 2, 290: “Et per hac satisfieri illis debet, qui sciscitantur utrum iure naturalis dominii possimus Christiani infideles armis infestare, qui pro suorum morum ruditate, naturales videntur esse servi. Nullum enim inde ius contra eos acquirimus vi illos subiugandi”.
See e.g., Acosta, De procuranda, ed. Pereña, vol. 1, lib. II, cap. 5, no. 1, 282–284. I have discussed this in more detail in Allemann, “After Vitoria”.
This will be the subject of Chapter 6 of this book.
See the insightful discussion in Scattola, “Sklaverei, Krieg und Recht”.
Zeron, Ligne de foi, 275; and Brett, Changes of State, 94–95.
Kaufmann, “Slavery between Law, Morality, and Economy”, 218–221.
The next couple of paragraphs draw on biographical information on Molina provided by Barrientos García, Repertorio de moral económica, 293–295; and MacGregor, Luis de Molina, chs. 1–2. Further valuable information on Molina’s life is available in Aichele and Kaufmann, “Introduction”, xiv–xvi; and in Stegmüller, Geschichte des Molinismus, 1–9.
Höpfl, Jesuit Policital Thought, 10–11.
Moreira and Azevedo Alves, De Salamanca a Coimbra y Évora, 31: “Luis e Molina—un español de formación portuguesa”.
See Molina, Concordia liberi arbitrii. A concise summary of the controversy is provided in Aichele and Kaufmann, “Introduction”, xxiii–xxvi. For more extensive discussions, see Freddoso, “Introduction”; Ruhstorfer, “Sola Gratia”; and Cruz Cruz, “Predestination as Transcendent Theology”.
Aichele and Kaufmann, “Introduction”, xxix.
For details about the publication history of the De iustitia et iure, see Pena González, La Escuela de Salamanca, 156; and Barrientos García, Repertorio de moral económica, 295–296.
The best studies of Molina’s treatise of slavery are Kaufmann, “Slavery between Law, Morality, and Economy”; Zeron, Ligne de foi, 271–294; and Hespanha, “Luís de Molina e a escravização dos negros”.
See e.g., Haar and Simmermacher, “The Foundation of the Human Being Regarded as a Legal Entity in the ‘School of Salamanca’ ”; and Tellkamp, “Über den Zusammenhang von Freiheit und Sklaverei bei Vitoria und Soto”.
See e.g., Coxito, “Luis de Molina e a escravatura”; and Brieskorn, “Die Sklaverei in der Beurteilung des Luis de Molina S.J.”.
García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud, 14: “A las fuentes les damos la interpretación que se les dio en los momentos y en la época que fueron usadas, excluyendo posibles interpretaciones modernas de esos textos”.
For a similar historiographical critique, see Zeron, Ligne de foi, 18–19 and 31.
Frank Costello, The Political Philosophy of Luis de Molina, 191.
Most forcefully in Schirrmacher, Die Politik der Sklaverei, 194: “Molina […] der den Handel mit subsaharischen negro-Sklaven scharf kritisierte”. And in Coxito, “Luis de Molina e a escravatura”, 136: “É certo no entanto que para Molina o ideal seria criarem-se condições para que o tráfico de escravos pudesse ser proscrito, em nome da liberdade e da dignidade da pessoa humana”. See also the equally problematic portrayals of Molina as a defender of the liberty of sub-Saharan Africans in Joner, “Impressions of Luis de Molina about the Trade of African Slaves”, 49; García Añoveros, “Luis de Molina y la esclavitud de los negros africanos en el siglo XVI”, 328–329; Craveiro da Silva, “Luis de Molina”, 554–546; and Brieskorn, “Die Sklaverei in der Beurteilung des Luis de Molina S.J.”, 95.
Kaufmann, “Slavery between Law, Morality, and Economy”, 222 and 225. The same is argued in MacGregor, Luis de Molina, 223 and 225.
See Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 10–11. See also Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières, 72.
On this point, I disagree with Marcocci, who argues that Molina ultimately condemned the Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans. See Marcocci, A consciência de um império, 426.
Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History?.
Conrad, What is Global History?, 4.
Conrad, What is Global History?, 12.
Conrad, What is Global History?, 116 and 135–136.
Conrad, What is Global History?, 118.
Conrad, What is Global History?, 160.
Moyn and Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History. The journal Global Intellectual History was launched in 2016, under the aegis of Richard Whatmore. Other recent studies bearing this title include Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law; and Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, a part of which was published as Chapter 7 of the Moyn and Sartori volume mentioned at the start of this footnote.
Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History”.
Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History”, 4 and passim.
Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History”, 239.
On the notion of serial contextualism, see Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea?”. Armitage first applied this methodology in his recent global intellectual history of civil wars from ancient Rome to the 20th century: Armitage, Civil Wars. For an advocacy of the longue durée in the study of history more broadly speaking, see also Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto. For a critique of the latter, see Cohen and Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique”.
Cooper, “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?”, 286.
Cooper, “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?”, 289. On this point, see also Moyn, “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas”.
Tom Pye, for instance, has pointed to the danger of over-emphasizing global contexts at the expense of how space was construed intellectually, arguing that John Locke’s imperial involvement is not the decisive context for understanding his theory of property. See Pye, “Property, Space and Sacred History in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government”.
Kapila, “Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political”, 260.
Kapila, “Armitage on Civil Wars”, 320.
Benton, “Afterward”.
Benton, “Afterward”, 258.
Benton, “Afterward”, 255. A masterful example of such a study is Brett’s Changes of State.
Pocock, “On the Unglobality of Contexts”, 9–12. See also Dunn, “Why We Need a Global History of Political Thought”.
Pocock, “On the Unglobality of Contexts”, 12.
This is a tacit critique of the work of István Hont and those writing in his vein, for whom the 18th century marked a sharp break from earlier visions of politics and anticipated the contours of the modern, global economic order. See Hont, Jealousy of Trade.
Adelman, “What is Global Histoy Now?”.
On “Europe” as a historical category in medieval and early modern history, see Oschema, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter; and Groebner, “Europas Grenzen?”.
See Benton and Clulow, “Webs of Protection and Interpolity Zones in the Early Modern World”.
See Belmessous, “Introduction”. See also Premo and Yannakakis, “A Court of Sticks and Branches”; and Owensby and Ross, “Making Law Intelligible in Comparative Context”.
See Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, ch. 3.
This point is highlighted in Benton, “Beyond Anachronism”, 25 fn. 49: “Fitzmaurice misses the explicit aim of the works of many socio-legal historians (including me) to uncover the interrelation of juridical thought to legal practice. This is an unfortunate misrepresentation”. Benton here refers to Fitzmaurice, “Context and the History of International Law”.
We shall turn to this in more detail in Chapter 4.
This will be the subject of Chapter 3.