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Robbie Shilliam, “Discovery, Conquest and Colonialism” in Foundations of International Relations , ed. Stephen McGlinchey (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 25–41. Question: If the age of colonialism is over why do we still need to discuss it? As the previous chapter argued, 1648 was the origin point for our global system. However, another year is worthy of mention. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from the Canary Islands off the north-west African coast, crossed the Atlantic, landed in the Bahamas and thus inaugurated the age of European empire and the rise of what we nowadays call ‘the West’. From the introduction of potatoes into culinary diets worldwide, to the genocides of indigenous peoples, to slavery and abolition, and to the creation of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen (the United States), the ‘discovery’ of the Americas has come to fundamentally shape our present. This chapter situates the idea of discovery within the European mapping of the world prevalent in Columbus’s era. This map sketched out a hierarchy of human beings, with those belonging to European Christendom occupying the apex position, thus justifying the conquest of non-European, non-Christian peoples. The chapter also asks whether the ‘conquest’ and ‘discovery’ associated with 1492 might contain deeper-determining norms and practices than those of ‘non-intervention’ and ‘sovereignty’ associated with 1648. Comparing the perspectives in this chapter with the prior chapter should allow you to understand the contested nature of history and the ways in which this impacts our view of the present. This chapter therefore builds on our understanding of history by suggesting that ideas such as sovereignty and diplomacy have always been entangled with conquest and colonialism. The 1492 map of the world Different points of departure can give rise to different narratives that open up important nuances for anyone beginning their journey with International Relations. Consider, for instance, the Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Castile (part of today’s Spain), which in 1494 granted jurisdiction over the Americas to the two European powers. Instead of illustrating the rise of a modern state system (as we saw following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), this departure point highlights the pre-existing logic of European imperial expansion and the consolidation of colonialism. In that sense, while the state system has outlasted imperialism, it can also be argued that five hundred years of colonial rule have nonetheless fundamentally shaped the political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of our ‘post’-colonial global system. Strangely, 1492 does not feature prominently in the years of departure with which we normally sketch out our understandings of the contemporary world. To answer why, we need to once more reconsider the image garnered from Westphalia in 1648 where you will most probably imagine armies fighting across central Europe. Here, events happen on land. But think 1492, and you will imagine discovery and conquest across the ocean (see Table 3.1).
Cartography is the art of map making. It involves arrangement (how the parts are defined and laid out) and animation (what each part does and how are they connected to each other). By using 1492 as our departure point, we must grapple with different cartographic challenges to that of 1648. Instead of mainland Europe, we can look to the oceans and non-European islands and landmasses. Instead of sovereign territories in Europe we can sketch out an expanding imperium (the area under imperial rule spread more globally). Instead of non-intervention, we must consider conquest to be an organising principle of how actors carve out their space. And, rather than diplomacy and war being the practice that animates these actors, we must look towards the act of discovery and the pursuit of colonisation. Considering these factors leaves us with a range of issues to ponder, each of which allows us to build on or perhaps challenge the traditional image of history that was outlined in the previous chapter. Firstly, 1492 might be a far more portentous date for humanity than 1648, as the act of discovery might be more important for scholars than the recognition of sovereignty. Secondly, we might need to refresh our cartographic skills – our physical, but also mental, map-making abilities – to not only attend to peace-making in Europe but also the imperial expansion across the world that followed Columbus’s journey. Towards this aim, we can think of different ways of defining and laying out the constituent parts of International Relations. We can also think more deeply about what principles animated these parts to action. Above all, we can think about what discovery meant for Columbus, and how its meaning and practice were embedded within broader policies of imperial expansion amongst the polities of European Christendom, especially the Spanish and Portuguese. It is also important to fully understand what we mean by ‘discovery’. In Columbus’s era, ‘discovery’ did not necessarily refer to unknown land. Rather, to discover meant to uncover land that was known to exist yet had remained hidden (Washburn 1962). This might seem like a pedantic distinction to make. It is, though, a crucial one. The expansion of European Christendom across the world was not conceived of as a haphazard process but as one that was divinely ordained. In order to understand why in 1492 Columbus took upon himself and his crew the risk of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean into the unknown we first need to examine how the scholarly community of European Christians of that age mapped out the world.
maintained traction, even when evidence was presented to the contrary. By 1482, the Portuguese had established their first fort south of the Sahara Desert at Elmina on the coast of current-day Ghana; and in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the south-west of the African continent. Portuguese outposts relied on trade with local Africans. Yet the myth of monstrous people and natural slaves remained attached to the West African coastline and was still widespread when Columbus was planning his journey.
Conquest and conversion Theologically, the Christian map of the world justified the connection between discovery and conquest. In practice, the justification of expansionary warfare in defence of Christianity was established with the ‘Reconquista’ – a centuries-long struggle by Christian forces to take back the Iberian Peninsula (today’s Spain and Portugal) from the Islamic dynasties of the Moors. While the reconquest began in the early 700s, its framing through religious ideology began with the idea of a Christian ‘holy war’, or crusade, against Islam. The reconquest featured a particular system of economic extraction that underwrote military campaigning on the Iberian Peninsula. At the centre of this system lay the encomienda, a grant to conquerors of land taken from Muslim owners or rulers. Backed up by the Spanish Crown, the encomienda system permitted the extraction of labour and tribute from the defeated population. From the Crusades onwards, then, it was deemed entirely right for Christians to conquer non-Christian lands and hold their people in effective bondage. Crucially, even before 1492, the Reconquista was an intrinsically extra-European affair. While the Portuguese were busy making judgements about people living on the north-west African coastline, the attention of the Spanish fell upon the Canary Islands. The War of Castilian Succession (1474–9) was fought in part due to an attempt by the king and queen of Castile and Aragon, what was to become the Kingdom of Spain, to encroach upon the trade that the Portuguese king, Afonso V, enjoyed on the Atlantic African mainland coastline. A good part
their attention to establishing direct monarchical rule over all the Canary Islands. At this point, Pope Sixtus IV – who would a few years later confirm the right of the Portuguese to enslave Africans – reaffirmed his predecessor’s decree of 1435 against the enslavement of Canary natives who were in the process of being converted. The presence of indigenous peoples in the Canary Islands complicated the principles of holy war primarily because they did not fit neatly into Christian cartography. The islands existed on the very border of the torrid zones, just above Cape Bojador. But curiously, these peoples did not appear in the biblical genealogy of the descendants of Adam and Eve. They could not then be regarded as the descendants of Ham, who had a prominent place in the genealogy of the Old Testament, supposedly as the rightful slaves of Japheth (Europeans). Nor could they be conflated with Muslims. These indigenous peoples had not rejected the gospel of Christ as they had not yet been exposed to it. Hence, while Canary Islanders might be said to naturally come under the domination of European Christendom, as innocents they could only be dominated through the process of peaceful conversion to the faith. Indeed, as ‘hot’ nations, the inhabitants could be considered wise and tameable – that is, capable of peaceful conversion to Christianity. That was the reasoning of the Papacy. But the Spanish Crown had to contend with the practicalities of colonising the Canary Islands, which in part undermined the Papacy’s lofty position. As they pushed forward their conquest of the Canary Islands, Ferdinand and Isabella also began the final push to reconquer the Iberian mainland, warring with the last Islamic polity, the Emirate of Granada, between 1482 and 1492. During this time, Pope Sixtus IV granted tithing revenue (essentially taxes that Christians gave to the church) to the Spanish monarchs so that they could finance the war. And the Pope gave the same right to the monarchs when it came to the Canary Islands. Peaceful conversion was therefore key to a successful conquest for the Spanish monarchs, both religiously and economically: once converted, these peoples would become taxpayers to the Crown. But the monarchs were not the ones doing the actual conquering; they entrusted this dirty work to mercenaries – hired hands. Paradoxically, mercenaries would be locked out of any revenue streams if the indigenous peoples peacefully submitted to Spain. This is why, despite Papal decrees and the like, conquistadors pursued the final conquest of the Canary Islands with the same method as those who conquered Granada. It did not matter if the peoples were (guilty) infidels or (innocent) heathens. In both cases, lands were expropriated through brute force and oppression and their peoples oftentimes placed into bondage. So, by the time that Columbus was planning to set sail, the conquest of the Canary Islands had already presented a set of deep cartographic challenges to the mapping of the world. Above all, if conquest and discovery, combined, animated the world map, this combination became troublesome in the already-inhabited Atlantic islands. Significant questions arose, such as: what did the location of the natives say about their characteristics? How did these natives fit into a holy war of conquest when they were not even mentioned in the Bible? And how could religious, political and economic interests be reconciled so as to peacefully incorporate these natives into the church and empires of European Christendom? Such conundrums and questions were ultimately resolved by brute force in southern Spain and in the Canary Islands. These questions
- and their violent resolutions – would soon travel with Columbus to a set of islands on the other side of the Atlantic (Fernández-Armesto 1994). Discovery and the apocalypse In April 1492, Columbus met with Ferdinand and Isabella to petition support for his voyage. Technically, the question as to whether land could conceivably exist across the Atlantic revolved around the prospective proportion of land to water in the circle of the earth. On this question, Columbus favoured a higher proportion of land to water, which logically allowed for the argument to be made that land across the Atlantic (what was believed to be the east coast of India, as the continent of America was not known to exist) was much closer to Europe than otherwise thought. His opponents favoured the opposite – and of course they were correct as it would later be discovered that the earth is approximately two-thirds covered by water. Columbus made four different voyages to the Americas (see Map 3.2). Famously, when he first arrived, he thought he had reached the Indies, not knowing that the American continent existed and stood between Europe and Asia. Far more important than the science argument was a religious one: Columbus’s opponents charged him with heresy. Primarily, they drew upon the authority of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) who had believed that the geographical dispersal of humanity after the biblical flood was delimited to the known world, that is, the known landmasses of Europe, Asia and Africa. Columbus responded by mapping discovery onto the apocalyptic calendar of Christianity. In theological terms, ‘apocalypse’ does not mean the cataclysmic end of the world but rather the final revelation of divine mystery. The biblical Book of Revelations sets out a
rich trade in enslaved humans, gold, ivory and pepper, he also reported that the area was densely populated and, to a good extent, temperate. Crucially, his journey west was also a journey south
- into the tropics. Influenced by Marco Polo’s travelogue, and especially his mention of the most easterly islands (Japan), Columbus believed that the ‘Indies’ stretched from the temperate zone into the tropics and that they could be approached, as such, by crossing the Atlantic (see Gómez 2008). His journey was therefore doubly heretical: he did not only wish to find new temperate lands that were not in the Bible, he also wished to find tropical peoples who, he argued, against the convention of existing Christian maps, could be converted to Christianity. This is why Columbus began his voyage at the end of the so-called inhabitable world – in the newly conquered Canary Islands, just north of Cape Bojador. And existing questions over the nature of those island’s native inhabitants travelled with Columbus as he imagined what kinds of human being he might uncover across the Atlantic and bring into the Christian fold. Columbus was certain of one thing, at least. The peoples he would find in what would become known as the Western Indies were heathens; their existence was not even recorded in the Bible. And that meant that Columbus had full licence to bring them into Christianity, which at this apocalyptic time was protected by the Spanish monarchy. Just like the indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands, those across the Atlantic were to be conquered. But at the same time, and like the Canary Islands inhabitants, those across the Atlantic might be capable of conversion by peaceable means. They could not be treated as if they were Muslims: they had not refused the word of Christ; they had not even heard the word. What is more, just like Canary Islands natives, they could not be the children of Ham as their geographical location lay outside the Bible’s map. Hence, they could not be treated as natural slaves. Additionally, if the tropics could be temperate (if humans could live there without degenerating into unnatural monsters) then these natives across the Atlantic might have the same characteristics as ‘hot’ nations that lived in the temperate zone: wise, yet tameable – perfect converts. At this point it is helpful to turn to Columbus’s own words on how he described the first peoples he met in the Americas, on the island of Guanahani, in the present-day Bahamas: ‘They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion.’ But just as had been the case in the Canary Islands, so in the Caribbean did demands by the Spanish Crown for religious conversion clash with the demands by conquistadors for economic enrichment. After 1513, a legal instrument was presented as a resolution to this clash. The Requerimiento, a declaration by the Spanish Crown enunciated by conquistadors, demanded that native ‘Indios’ accept the conquistadors’ dominion as well as their right to preach and convert. Crucially, the declaration also warned that rejection of Christian rule, and the consequences of it, would be the fault of the Indios themselves. Effectively, then, the Crown provided a legal pathway by which conquistadors could still treat native Indios as they had Canary Islands natives – as spoils of holy war, Muslims and/ or children of Ham. Hence the path was cleared for the expansion of the brutal encomienda system to the Americas.
Discovery and conquest were animated by an apocalyptic vision. The mapping of the New World relied on old world cartographies, although their principles of arrangement and animation would transform numerous times in the proceeding centuries (Wynter 1991). Ultimately the violence enacted in the Canary Islands, despite religious callings for peaceful conversion, was enacted in the New World – and to an unimaginable extent. After just one hundred and fifty years only 10 per cent of the indigenous populations remained across the Americas. Most were killed through war, land dispossession, and the diseases that took hold in the turbulence of colonisation (see Cameron et al. 2016). Kidnapped Africans (slaves) began arriving in Hispaniola (the island that is divided into today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic) in 1501 and by the mid-sixteenth century had begun to replace indigenous peoples as the prime source of bonded labour. This all gives a very different interpretation of the apocalypse: less a revelation and far more a genocide.
Nonetheless, we should not confuse the legal prohibition or formal abeyance of an action (slavery) with its practical absence. Recall that religious edicts designed to protect ‘innocent’ souls did not stop conquistadors from dispossessing land and putting peoples in bondage. These imperial practices and their norms, logics and techniques have outlived the particular edicts and laws that birthed them. Somewhere between legality and lived experience these practices continue. The minority of humanity in the ‘Global North’ or ‘West’ whose bodies are protected from oppression or abuse, and who enjoy inviolable rights to their property, might be living in a 1648 world. Yet, as highlighted by Black Lives Matter and related movements, the majority of humanity still lives in the aftermath – and afterlives – of 1492. Conclusion In 1492 Columbus uncovered the New World with an unshakeable principle: no native group could be allowed to retain their own understandings of land, time and political organisation. So 1648 and 1492 provide very different maps of the same world and require us to pursue different cartographic investigations concerning the arrangement and animation of the actors of global politics. The conventions of non-intervention and sovereignty are certainly important for International Relations, but they might not be more important than the politics eventuating from conquest and discovery. Put provocatively, we still need to discuss colonialism in International Relations because conquest and discovery might be more foundational to the making of today’s global system than non-intervention and sovereignty. That is the provocation that leads many scholars to seek to better understand our contemporary global predicaments, which are still laden with the after-effects of colonialism and all that came with it.
