The Birth of Human Rights

[unkleE]

Humphrey

I was interested in your discussion of this topic, especially about Bartoleme de las Casas, American Indian rights and Aristotle's "natural slavery".

In Australian history there was similar disrespect of the prior occupation by the Aboriginal peoples and their rights. The British settlers/invaders justified their disregard for the indigenous people by proposing the doctrine of terra nullius, the land was empty and the indigenous peoples only savages. A recent TV series gave an historical (and to some degree aboriginal) view of this, and it wasn't comfortable viewing, although there were some whites who treated the indigenous people with respect.

These injustices have only really begun to be redressed in my lifetime - aboriginal peoples were recognised in the constitution and given the vote only in 1967; their prior ownership of land, and rights to land whose prior ownership has not been "extinguished" by white settlement, were recognised in the Mabo case before the High Court in 1992, and the Australian Government finally took the historic step of formally saying "sorry" to the Aboriginal peoples for past injustices just this year.

I had often wondered how the British settlers could have been so indifferent (in the main) and sometimes inhumane to the indigenous peoples, and had presumed they hadn't really thought about it very much. But your discussion shows that the Spanish thought about, and argued over, their parallel situation in some detail.

Do you know of any similar argument in Britain re Australia or other places which the British annexed as part of their Empire?

[humphreyclarke]

This is probably a simplistic way of putting it but I think Aristotle's concept of 'natural slavery' seems to crop up at various points in history in different guises. You get the likes of Sepulveda arguing that the indigenous peoples are savages and there entitled to be used by the more superior manifestations of mankind. So he argues that "Those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves of nature. It is better for them to be ruled thus." He said the natives are "as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people".

From the 17th through the 19th centuries, folk beliefs about group differences merged with scientific explanations of those differences to produce an "ideology of race". This based itself on the past centuries of imperialism and attempted a kind of post hoc justification of the grounds of biological inferiority. Once you have divided humanity into separate breeds, it becomes easier to justify a kind of natural slavery doctrine. So for example Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) proposed that there were three races, and that race mixing led to the collapse of civilization. Polygenist theory alleged that there were different origins of mankind, thus making it possible to conceive of different, biological, human races, or to classify other humans as akin to animals without rights.

In Australia, it looks as if discrimination was justified by claiming the Land was ‘practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law’ or ‘deserted’ or ‘uncultivated’ or ‘uninhabited’. I don't think the more formal definition of terra nullis was used a lot until much later, it was enough to claim the land was not being used. Therefore it is a situation analogous to the European settlement of North America where indigenous usage of land conflicts with the type of land settlement and cultivation an Ulster Scot or and Englishman would practice. The two were incompatible and led to conflict. I suspect when the rights of natives were discussed they would have referred to the De Las Casas and the Salamanca school.

One arguement you might want to look at is that surrounding the Proclamation of 1763 which recognised Indian rights to their lands and put checks in place to prevent colonists from settling on unceded Indian land. this was one of the provocations for the American war of independence since it threatend to prevent the settlers from making their own deals with the Indians and accessing the lands of the interior.

[humphreyclarke]

Hey Unklee

I forgot to mention, I wrote my masters thesis on emigration to Australia from East Anglia (the region of the UK I am from). It is online here

www.foxearth.org.uk/Emigration2.html

If you know anyone who is from there and wants to try and trace their roots they might find it helpful. It is a bit dry and academic but I have had some positive feedback on it from antipodeans.