I

The conquest, occupation, and settlement of the Americas were the first large-scale European colonizing ventures since the fall of the Roman Empire. From Columbus’ first landfall on a still unidentified island in the Caribbean, which its inhabitants called Guarahani, on October 12, 1492, the Spanish – followed by the Portuguese, the French, the British, the Dutch, the Germans, and even briefly the Russians, the Swedes, and the Danes – established settlements in territories where they had no clear and obvious authority. Before long, and in varying degrees of intensity depending on the circumstances of the initial settlement, this gave rise to considerable anxiety as to what kind of rights, if any, these states might have in the lands they had occupied. In some cases the overseas territories had been acquired by treaty or purchase. In the case of the most significant in terms of sheer size and wealth, however – the Spanish, French and British in the the Americas – they had been acquired by forceful occupation. Their acquisition had, that is, involved warfare, and within the European legal tradition, violence by one group of people against another could only be legitimate when it was defensive. “The best state”, as Cicero had observed in a much-quoted phrase, “never undertakes war except to keep faith or in defense of its safety”. Of course, as Cicero well knew, the Roman state had frequently acquired clients, “allies” (socii), the need to “keep faith” with whom could be employed as a justification for what was in effect a war of conquest. But what the arguments from defence clearly could not easily do was legitimate attacks on remote populations whose very existence, in the most contentious case, had previously been entirely unknown. The debates over the legitimacy of the much publicized European “conquests” in the Americas therefore turned, inevitably, on the question of how what seemed uncontestably to be wars of occupation and dispossession could be presented as wars of defence.