Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920

Native Claims presents the work of a dozen colonial historians whose subjects ring the planet from Africa to Oceania to the Americas in a period spanning from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. What unites these projects is their narrow focus on legal conflicts among colonizing and colonized peoples during the early phases of contact, settlement, and state formation. The essays make extensive use of petitions, treaties, court records, and contextualizing documents of all kinds to capture the legal and rhetorical strategies of Europeans and non- Europeans, and to reconstruct their shared and divergent beliefs about diplomacy, property, and sovereignty. Topically, the chapters fall into several geographical categories: Jovita Baber and Rolena Adorno address Spanish America; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Craig Yirush, and Saliha Belmessous cover British (and in the latter case, also French) North America; Lauren Benton examines Portuguese sites in West Africa and Moluccas; Kristen Mann looks at British Lagos;...