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Religious Aspects of Symbolic Acts of Sovereignty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
MOST colonial territories were claimed or acquired by the symbolical ritual of taking possession. Nevertheless, this ritual ceremony is a subject that has been largely neglected in the historical literature of our nation. Few people, aside from historians, realize or know what an act of possession or sovereignty is. Even among these, there are those who simply overlook or ignore the historical importance and significance of the ceremony by which explorers and colonizers laid claim to territory in the New World. Yet there were extremely few boundary disputes and even colonial wars which did not retrace their antecedents to the performance of an act of sovereignty by some explorer of the rival colonial powers of Spain, England, and France.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1957
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