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The Spanish Invention of Rights and International Law

Task: Like last week - select an excerpt from the primary sources to present in class

Primary Sources

Bartolome de las Casas, A short account of the destruction of the Indies, edited and translated by Nigel Griffin; with an introduction by Anthony Pagden.

Francisco de Vitoria, On the American Indies, in A. Pagden ed., Political Writings, chapter 6, e book available

Core Reading

Brunstetter, Daniel R., Sepúlveda, Las Casas, and the Other: Exploring the Tension between Moral Universalism and Alterity, The Review of Politics, 7/1/2010, Vol. 72, Issue 3, p. 409-435.

Garcia y Garcia, Antonio, “The Spanish School of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Precursor of the Theory of Human Rights”, Ratio Juris, 10, 1 (1997): 25-35.

Pagden, A., The fall of natural man: the American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology (Cambridge, 1982).

Scott, James, The Spanish origin of international law, Part 1, Francisco de Vitoria and his law of nations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.

Further Reading

Anghie, Anthony, “Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law” in Peter Fitzpatrick eds, Laws of the Postcolonial, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 89-107.

Brunstetter, Daniel R, 'Just War against Barbarians: Revisiting the Valladolid Debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas', Political Studies. Oct2011, Vol. 59 Issue 3, p733-752.

Hanke, Lewis, All mankind is one : a study of the disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the intellectual and religious capacity of the American Indians, DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1994.
────── Aristotle and the American Indians: a study in race prejudice in the modern world, London: Hollis & Carter, 1959.
────── Bartolomé de Las Casas, historian: an essay in Spanish historiography, Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1952.
────── History of Latin American civilization: sources and interpretations, London: Methuen, 1969.
────── The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.

Anthony Pagden, 'Human Rights, Natural Rights, And Europe’s Imperial Legacy', Political Theory, 4/1/2003, Vol. 31, Issue 2, p. 171-199.

Reviewed Work: The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology by Anthony Pagden, Review by: Sabine G. Maccormack, American Ethnologist, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 607-608.