Native Claims

This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim.

Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.


"'Brilliant' and 'groundbreaking' are much over-used adjectives in blurbs for academic works, but their appearance on the back cover of this edited collection is fully deserved...[A]n international and interdisciplinary work with profound regional implications, and will give considerable encouragement to those in the historical and legal professions."--BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly

"Native Claims is a different sort of book. The contributors are leading scholars in their respective fields...Their standards of writing are high, and their specific historical cases are nicely contextualized for nonspecialist readers. This makes for a volume that is both an important scholarly contribution and an accessible collection of writing. Native Claims will surely provoke discussion among a wide variety of historians, and it will merit a place on the syllabi of courses in Atlantic history, world history, colonial studies, ethnohistory, and frontier studies."--Hispanic American Historical Review

"Tightly focused yet wide-ranging...Books rarely bring together essays from the very different fields of Latin America, British America, Australasia, and West Africa, and this useful, groundbreaking work should be a model for future collaborations. Highly recommended."--CHOICE

"The essays teem with rich information and penetrating insights."--The Journal of American History