For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.

Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

This chapter starts the history of amtiracist discourse with the antislavery texts of bisshop Nyssa in the 4th century. In Europe one of the first declaratio against "servitude" was formilated by Louis X of France. The first texts against the harsh treatments of indigenous people in the America Colonies were formulated by Bartolomé de las Casas and the New Laws of King Carlos I of Spain.

Beginning with their Master General, Cajetan, Spanish Dominicans precipitated and outlined the theological parameters for thinking about infidel dominium of peoples outside Europe as a matter of restitution and salvation. This pairing of justice and evangelization opposed the long-standing idea and practice of missionary war in the theocratic conception of world order that linked conquest and preaching and was being defended by Spanish theocratic royalists and the “modern” theology of John Mair. In 1535, after Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo Soto, and Bartolomé de las Casas drew from the inspirational example of the first Dominican missionaries to the New World and began formulating an unprecedented scholastic theological conception of world order. Appealing to Scripture, the apostolic tradition, Thomistic moral theology, Roman law, and canon law, their account of world order contained a discourse of natural subjective rights for all persons made in the divine image, attentive to restoring the injustices suffered by the Amerindians of the New World. The originality of the Spanish Dominicans, with Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis at the center, lay in their articulation of infidel rights over and against unjust European claims of expansionary religious wars waged by emperors and popes alike.

The culmination of the clash between two conceptions of infidel dominium and world order expressed itself most dramatically at the Valladolid junta of the Spanish imperial court. This debate put on perspicuous display two opposed ethics of evangelization embedded in the theology and canon law of the Latin West: an apostolic method of peaceful preaching and a coercive method of missionary war. Las Casas and Sepúlveda, respectively, took up these two approaches with startling results. Drawing on biblical and theological legal sources, both deployed natural law and the law of nations to advance their political arguments concerning Christian-infidel relations, thus signaling the ambivalent ideological tone of international relations in the West. Whereas Sepúlveda defended the justice of Spanish imperial dispossession of native peoples through war, Las Casas radically accounted for Amerindian claims of just war against European aggressors. By turning to Valladolid in depth, the unique scholastic theological and juristic contributions of Las Casas and the Spanish Dominicans appear with greater salience for international legal thought. Additionally, the understated ideological vestiges of Sepúlveda’s Spanish imperial humanism for early modern and modern European expansion also come into sharp relief.

In view of seventeenth-century Protestant humanist transformations, this concluding chapter returns to the Spanish Dominicans and their scholastic-juristic view on the law of nations as a normative resource for thinking about international society. Their Thomistic attention to the rationality of the universal law of nations as positive human law enabled political recognition of non-European polities, the lawful occupants of the Indies. This contrasted with an imperial-humanist jurisprudence that provincialized natural law and the law of nations under European civilizational hierarchy to justify dispossession of inferior peoples. The chapter especially charts the evolution of Las Casas’s thinking through his interaction with the theologians at Salamanca. His eclectic synthesis of Thomistic theology, canon law, Roman law, and humanism to buttress indigenous occupation exemplified a radical scholastic brand of legal humanism that complicates static ideological categories in the history of international legal thought. By placing Las Casas in conversation with his Dominican confreres, a normative view of the law of nations grounded in Christian theological convictions emerges. It accounts for the independence and interdependence of all peoples, and the indispensable role of justice and solidarity in promoting world order under a Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbors.

Already in the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri went straight to the heart of early modern Christianity’s moral conundrum, putting into stark relief its astonishing ethical presumptions regarding salvation and condemnation. He suggests, ominously, that there is a constant potential for epistemic as well as bodily violence in Christian “charity” and notions of “justice” regarding non-Christians who reside far from Europe, although it is unclear in this canto whether the judgment that is supposed to await nonbelievers is to be meted out within the course of history or beyond it.2