John Locke on Native Right, Colonial Possession, and the Concept ofVacuum domicilium

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3969938
AutoresPatrick Corcoran (0000-0003-1201-7136, The University of Adelaide, autor de correspondencia), Paul Corcoran (0000-0001-7186-7187, The University of Adelaide)
Año2018
Volumen23
Número3
Páginas225-250
Fecha de publicación2018-04-03
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe European Legacy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10848770.2017.1416766
OpenAlexW2778732962
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas53

The early paragraphs of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) describe a poetic idyll of property acquisition widely supposed by contemporary theorists and historians to have cast the template for imperial possessions in the New World. This reading ignores the surprises lurking in Locke’s later chapters on conquest, usurpation, and tyranny, where he affirms that native rights to lands and possessions survive to succeeding generations. Locke warned his readers that this “will seem a strange doctrine, it being quite contrary to the practice of the world.” His doctrine of native right is equally strange to recent scholars who see in Lockean theory the ideological prototype for England’s colonial expropriation in the “vacant lands” of North America. This interpretation, dignified by the elusive principle of vacuum domicilium, is considerably weakened when Locke’s arguments are placed in the historical context of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English colonial experience. Locke’s Second Treatise, with its literary flourish of a vast and idyllic state of nature, was written in the full appreciation of Amerindian agriculture, its established populations, the acknowledgement of native property rights, and the policy and practice of purchasing land from the native inhabitants

Archaeology · Colonialism · Doctrine · Expansionism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment