(p. 263 ) Index

(4) . As Jane Lydon comments, for Aboriginal people, “meetings constituted performances”; dancing with strangers “expressed a formal relationship and was a key form of communication.” Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 27.

(41) . After the loss of Acadia and Newfoundland, the French founded the colony of Isle Royale, which included Isle St-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and the Isle Royale, previously known as Cape Breton. Louisbourg was established as the capital of the colony, and it soon became one of New-France’s most important economic and, especially, military centers thanks to its extensive fortifications.

(12) . Loveridge, Origins of the Native Lands Acts and Native Land Court; Richard Boast, Buying the Land, Selling the Land: Governments and Māori Land in the North Island 1865–1921 (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 2008); David V. Williams, “Te Kooti Tango Whenua”: The Native Land Court, 1864–1909 (Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers, 1999); Angela Ballara, Iwi: The Dynamics of Māori Tribal Organisation from c. 1769 to c. 1945 (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 1998), chs. 7, 17. The Waitangi Tribunal investigates historical breaches of the treaty. Loveridge’s lengthy report was undertaken as part of the tribunal process, and the books by Boast and Williams owe much to their authors’ involvement in the researching of the Treaty of Waitangi claims and counterclaims; Ballara is now a member of the tribunal. On the treaty claims process and its historical revisions, see Miranda Johnson, “Making History Public: Indigenous Claims to Settler States,” Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008): 97–117; Giselle Byrnes, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History (Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 2004), as well as Jim McAloon’s critique, “By Which Standards? History and the Waitangi Tribunal,” New Zealand Journal of History 40, no. 2 (2006): 194–213, and the replies by Byrnes (ibid., 214–229), Michael Belgrave (ibid., 230–250), and W. H. Oliver (ibid. 41, no. 1 [2007]: 83–87).

(64) . Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent, 101–103, has shown how official policy and local practice combined to make land rules ambiguous and subject to ongoing reinterpretation in twentieth-century Africa. She has argued that, as a consequence, peoples’ access to land has depended on their participation in processes of interpretation and adjudication. What Berry says of the twentieth century was true in Lagos by the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Since then judges, administrators, scholars, and the public have all expended much time, energy, and—in the case of the public—money contesting the meaning of Crown grants. For brief introductions to this subject, see Tew, Report, 16–23; Elias, Nigerian Land Law, 21–28; and Coker, Family Property, 182–216 passim.

(60) . I have been influenced by David Conroy’s account of Bollan’s role in the case, especially his claim that Bollan adopted an indigenous perspective before the 1743 commission. However, I disagree with his assumption that Bollan was acting for the Masons and not the Mohegans. Although we appear to have no record of who Bollan consulted with (or was paid by), his forceful defense of the Mohegans is closer in substance to the position of the tribe (expressed in Oweneco’s 1704 letter, as well as their petitions to the Crown in the 1730s) than the less robust claims of the Masons (which held that the tribes’ members were subjects of the Crown rather than allies). See Conroy,“The Defense of Indian Land Rights.”

(54) . The Mohegans were assisted by William Shirley, a powerful imperial figure whose protégé, William Bollan, would represent the tribe before the final royal commission in 1743. Shirley was able to get a copy of the Mohegans’ complaint to the Duke of Newcastle, then the Secretary of State with responsibility for the American colonies. See Shirley’s letter to the Duke of Newcastle in CSPC, #259. Volume 42 (1735–1736), 160. On the Mohegans’ journey to London, see Alden Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 162–163.

(12) . Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 160, characterizes the Chacha groups as “small homogeneous enclaves forming a far-flung net of small mitmaq operations” found in the environs of former aboriginal sites converted into Inca centers, possibly with “responsibility for controlling the interaction of aborigines with the privileged population of the new citadels.”

(2) . For the term “permeable barrier,” see Joyce Chaplin, “No magic bullets: Archery, ethnography, and military intelligence,” in Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and (p. 103 ) Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001), 85.

(49) . Compensation Court hearing on Oakura, New Plymouth, June 1866 (Chief Judge Fenton and Judges John Rogan and Henry A. H. Monro), in Fenton, Important Judgments, 9. The Compensation Court “seems to have been, in effect, more or less the same institution as the Native Land Court…. Both institutions were presided over by Francis Dart Fenton as Chief Judge, and other judicial personnel (such as Judges Rogan and Monro) also overlapped. Much of the body of precedent later applied in the Native Land Court was first created by the Compensation Court.” Spiller, Finn, and Boast, A New Zealand Legal History, 148.

(1) . “Zona de contacto” was the term I coined in 1987 to describe the space occupied by cultural intermediaries like Guaman Poma; it was taken up in English as “contact zone” by Mary Pratt in her 1992 book. See Rolena Adorno, “Waman Puma: el autor y su obra,” in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, edited by John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge L. Urioste (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987), 1: xvii–xviii; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1991), 6–7.

(57) . Just what the Ọba meant by this request is unclear, because the Treaty of Cession stated only that in the transfer of lands the King’s seal would be proof that “there are no other native claims on it.” Col. Ord maintained after interviewing Dosunmu that the king wanted, by fixing his seal, to establish the Ọba’s title to land belonging to deceased natives. PP 1865.XXXVII.287, Report of Col. Ord on the Condition of the British Settlements on the West Coast of Africa, 312–313, and Appendix C, “The humble Petition of Docemo … to … Parliament …,” n.d., 330.

(35) . British consuls recorded a number of Dosunmu’s grants, and those that survive can be found in a bound volume in the Strong Room at the Lagos Land Registry.

(56) . One further government action had long-term implications for land ownership in the town of Lagos. An anti-European uprising at Abeokuta in 1867 led many Egba Christians to flee south to the British colony. Administrator J. H. Glover obtained for these refugees land at Ebute Metta, on the mainland across from Lagos Island, from Chief Oloto, the Idẹjọ with authority over the area. Glover had the territory laid out in blocks, and he then entrusted the headman of the group with settling each refugee and “his family” on a plot and obtaining a ticket to the land for him. A few of the approximately seven hundred settlers who obtained land in this way subsequently applied for Crown grants to their parcels, but the majority did not. Much of the land in the government layout remained unoccupied following settlement by the Egba refugees, and as the population of the city subsequently grew, others acquired plots there through a variety of means—squatting, government allocation, and sale or grant by ticket holders or members of the Oloto family. In time, the question of who owned the land in this section of the city and how they owned it became very complicated and gave rise to “bitter conflict and much litigation,” the more so because a Land Commissioner at some point burned the government’s copies of the “Glover tickets,” and many ticket holders lost or destroyed theirs. Tew, Report, 13–25; Meek, Land Tenure, 58–62; Stanhope Rowton Simpson, A Report on the Registration of Title to Land in the Federal Territory of Lagos (Lagos: Federal Government Printer, 1957), 37. Bound volumes recording the government’s Crown grants can be found in the Strong Room of the Lagos Land Registry. On the uprising at Abeokuta, see S. O. Biobaku, The Egba and Their Neighbours, 1842–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) 83–84; and J. F. A. Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, 1965), 200–203.

(65) . The government defined the rights conferred by Glover tickets no more clearly than it did those vested in Crown grants. Over time, however, judges and officials treated the tickets much the way they did Crown grants—as conveying fee-simple title subject, in certain cases, to family rights. In the 1920s, the Oloto family stepped up efforts to reassert its rights to land within the Glover layout, inspired perhaps by changes in land policy after the turn of the century, as well as by the Privy Council’s 1921 decision in Amodu Tijani v. The Secretary, Southern Nigeria. The family had little success, however, with plots that had been allotted to the Egba refugees. Tew, Report, 29–31.

(59) . Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica, 963: “A de ser monarca el rrey don Phelipe el terzero que Dios le acresente su uida, estado para el gobierno del mundo y defensa de nuestra santa fe católica, servicio de Dios. El primero: Ofresco un hijo mío, príncipe deste rreyno, nieto y bisnieto de Topa Ynga Yupanqui, el décimo rrey, gran sauio, el que puso ordenansas; a de tener en esa corte el príncipe para memoria y grandesa del mundo. El segundo, un príncipe del rrey de Guinea, negro; el terzero, del rrey de los cristianos de Roma o de otro rrey del mundo; el quarto, el rrey de los moros de Gran Turco, los quatro coronados con su septro y tuzones. En medio destos quatro partes del mundo estará la magestad y monarca del mundo rrey don Phelipe que Dios le guarde de la alta corona. Representa monarca del mundo y los dichos quatro rreys, sus coronas bajas yguales…. Porque el rrey es rrey de su juridición, el enperador es enperador de su juridición, monarca no tiene juridición; tiene debajo de su mano mundo estos rreys coronados.”

(16) . Guaman Poma’s chronicle references to activities after 1600 are confined to the Lucanas region. He wrote about local events spanning the years from 1608 to 1615; noteworthy occurrences of the years 1611, 1612, and 1613 are especially plentiful. References to some twenty-odd native settlements and colonial officials of Lucanas are found in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno as well as in his February 14, 1615, letter to Philip III; the letter is transcribed and translated into English in Adorno, Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle, 79–86.

(6) . This brief overview of Guaman Poma’s life and legal battles summarizes Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru: Guaman Poma y su crónica ilustrada del Perú colonial (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, and the Royal Library, 2001), 27–29, 36–38, with grateful acknowledgement to the publisher for permission to reprint. Documentation of the legal proceedings are found in Rolena Adorno, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xxiii–xxxviii.

(32) . Hallam and his brother John were challenging the disposition of their stepfather’s estate by a Connecticut court. They were joined in their appeal to the Crown by Edward Palmes, the (p. 149 ) brother-in-law of Fitz-John Winthrop, who was also contesting the legality of a will. The Privy Council ruled against them, though it upheld their right to appeal to the Crown notwithstanding the charter. See Robert Taylor, Colonial Connecticut: A History (New York: KTO Press, 1979), 195–197. On the Crown’s inherent right to hear appeals from all of its subjects, see J. M. Sosin, English America and Imperial Inconstancy: The Rise of Provincial Autonomy, 1696–1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 179. The private colonies’ denial of such a right was a central grievance in the Board of Trade’s case against the chartered colonies. On this, see Louise P. Kellogg, The American Colonial Charter (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 267–272.

(14) . A clan or descent group associated with a distinct territory and settlement or settlements, and which may take collective action for certain purposes.

(2) . Telling the history of a concept or conception may involve simply bracketing claims about its truth-value in general, instead of having any necessary relation to its ultimate validity. I return to this issue in a moment.

(43) . Hobbes was a participant in the Virginian colonizing enterprise, attending 37 meetings of the company in the 1620s in his capacity as secretary to William Cavendish (3rd earl of Devonshire), and he also did some work for the company; see Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys and the Virginia Company,” Historical Journal 24 (1981); Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.

(64) . The full extent of Inca aggression against the Spanish invasion has been revealed relatively recently. The second rebellion of 1538–1539, which was the “last effort on a national scale to dislodge the invaders,” was not recorded by any single chronicler at the time; just a few decades ago, John Hemming (Conquest of the Incas [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970], 255, 584) reconstructed the events of this insurrection on the basis of dispersed public records.

(17) . RCRP, I, 134–136. Francis Jennings attributes the tribe’s embrace of English law to their surprise that the Gortonists were released from custody by Massachusetts after appealing to common law rights, whereas their own leader was murdered. See Jennings, The Invasion (p. 148 ) of America: Indians, Colonists and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 272–273.

(5) . Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Richard White has shown that social relations formed a “middle ground” between European colonizers and Native Americans, a violent and unstable forum in which knowledge was exchanged; see White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): Shoemaker examines the similarities between settler and Indian cultures in a later period.

(43) . Bartolomé de las Casas, Tratado de las doce dudas, in Obras escogidas de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas V, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 110 (Madrid: Atlas, 1958), 535: “Harán ciertos actos jurídicos por los cuales protesten recibir a Su Majestad por superior monarca o protector, y a los sucesores de Castilla y León, quedando ellos en lo demás en su entera libertad, y de aquello le den pacífica posesión en aquellos reinos.”

(6) . On legal humanism, see: Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Donald Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). On the ancient constitution and the common law in England, the standard work remains J.G.A Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in The Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); see also Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the use of legal humanism and the ancient constitution to legitimize the colonization of America, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 148–157.

(33) . Owaneko, Chief Sachem or Prince of the Moheagan-Indians in New England, HIS Letter to a Gentleman Now in London (London: Printed for Daniel Brown at the Black Swan without Temple-Bar, 1704), 1–2. The title page claims that Oweneco’s letter was “Faithfully Translated from the Original in the Indian Language.” It is a verbatim copy of a letter Oweneco wrote to Nicholas Hallam on July 14, 1703, which bore the sachem’s mark, as well as a claim that it was “The true Interpretation of Oanhekoe’s Grievance & Narration, by me John Stanton Interpreter Gent.” Oweneco’s letter is reprinted (with an interpretive essay by David Murray) in Katrina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 15–27.

(14) . James Lockhart has argued that the Tlaxcalans experienced the cabildo as a native institution in Spanish guise; see James Lockhart, “Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise,” History of European Ideas [Great Britain] 6, no. 4 (1985). Indeed, within Spanish tradition, the cabildo collected the taxes, allocated the lands of the community, regulated agriculture and markets, and served as the first instance in legal conflicts, which were essentially the same responsibilities the elite exercised during the pre-Hispanic period. While the adaptation of the cabildo did not transform dramatically local governance, as I argue elsewhere, it did allow the four noble houses in the center of the region to centralize political power. See R. Jovita Baber, “Empire, Indians and the Negotiation for Status in the City of Tlaxcala, 1521–1550,” in Negotiation with Domination: Colonial New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, ed. by Ethelia Ruíz Medrano and Susan Kellogg. (Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2010).

(73) . As with the other two appeals, little has been written on the Mashpee’s struggles with Massachusetts. I have relied on the following: Daniel Mandell, “‘We, as a tribe, will rule ourselves’: Mashpee’s Struggle for Autonomy, 1746–1840,” in Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 299–340; Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Donald M. Nielsen, “The (p. 151 ) Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833,” The New England Quarterly 58 (1985), 400–420; and Kim McQuaid, “William Apes, Pequot: An Indian Reformer in the Jackson Era,” The New England Quarterly 50 (1977), 605–625.

(4) . A project like this raises a number of methodological difficulties, the most pressing of which is the veracity of the textual materials that form its evidentiary base. Given that they were often recorded by Europeans who might have known little about the indigenous peoples whose views they were taking down (or had interested reasons for distorting the record), these documents may tell us more about the biases of the English (p. 147 ) than about the ideas of the natives themselves. In addition to bias, these texts also had to endure what James Merrell calls the “perils” of translation and transcription. James H. Merrell, “‘I desire all that I have said … may be taken down aright’: Revisiting Teedyusung’s 1756 Treaty Council Speeches,” William and Mary Quarterly LXIII (2006), 777–826 (quote at 783). While these are serious concerns, the legal records that this chapter is based on can, if used with care, yield important insights. As Daniel Richter, one of the leading New Indian historians, argues: “the most valuable clues to Iroquois perspectives come from the speeches native leaders made during diplomatic encounters with Euro-Americans.” Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 5–6. And despite his warnings about the perils of these texts, Merrell also contends that some of the difficulties of translation and cultural bias can be rectified by using multiple accounts of the same document, thereby achieving a “quadraphonic” or even “polyphonic” effect, allowing scholars to find “genuine echoes of a long-forgotten native voice and native sensibility.” Merrell, “‘I desire all that I have said,’” 819.

(31) . Quoted in Joseph H. Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 418. Despite its importance, the Mohegan case has not been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion. Paul Grant-Costa’s 2008 Yale dissertation (The Last Indian War in New England: The Mohegan Indians v. The Governour and Company of the Colony of Connecticut, 1703–1774) is the only book-length modern account. I discuss the legal claims made by both Crown and colony in “Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case,” Law and History Review 29 (2011), 333–373. Part of my account of the legal arguments in the case is drawn from this article. Copyright © 2011 the American Society for Legal Histroy, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University press. However, no scholar has yet tried to analyze just the arguments made by the Mohegans in the case, although Amy Den Ouden’s anthropological account of their internal politics provides important background on their understanding of the dispute. See Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 91–141. For important treatments of (respectively) the arguments of the Crown and the lawyer for the Mohegans, see Mark D. Walters, “Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut (1705–1773) and the Legal Status of Aboriginal Customary Laws and Government in British North America,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 33 (1995), 785–829; and David Conroy, “The Defence of Indian Land Rights: William Bollan and the Mohegan Case in 1743,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993), 395–424.

(6) . By contrast, the Narrangansetts were powerful enough that the Pequots appealed for their help against the English. The tributary status of Uncas and the Mohegans is evidence that Algonquin societies recognized hierarchical forms of organization and thus were able to put themselves under a European Crown, though as we will see they did this on their terms. On the Algonquins’ precontact conceptions of political authority, see Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 140–155.

(33) . Facsimile editions of Murúa’s manuscript histories are: Fray Martín de Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes Ingas del Pirú, de sus hechos, costumbres, trajes, y manera de gobierno, Códice Murúa. Facsímil (Madrid: Testimonio Compañía Editorial, 2004); idem, Historia general del Pirú: Facsimile of J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008). Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup, “Guaman Poma and the Manuscripts of Fray Martín de Murúa: Prolegomena to a Critical Edition of the Historia del Perú,” Fund og forskning I Det Kongelige Biblioteks samlinger (Copenhagen) 44 (2005): 107–258, analyze the relationship between Murúa’s and Guaman Poma’s manuscripts.

(7) . On the natural law tradition and the justification of European colonization, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origin of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Moral uncertainty in the dispossession of Native Americans,” in Peter Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 383–409.

(3) . The complete, digitized Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript, its transcription as a searchable data base, and the Expediente Prado Tello consisting of Guaman Poma’s legal petitions, are available on the Royal Library of Denmark’s Guaman Poma website: http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm. Print editions: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, Quechua translations by Jorge L. Urioste (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980) (see also note 1), Y no ay rremedio …, ed. Elías Prado Tello and Alberto Prado Prado (Lima: Centro de Investigaciones y Promoción Amazónica, 1991), and Juan A. Zorrilla, “La posesión de Chiara por los indios Chachapoyas,” Wari 1 (1977): 49–64. All citations of Guaman (p. 81 ) Poma’s chronicle correspond to the consecutive pagination of the autograph manuscript used on the website and in the Murra/Adorno 1980 and 1987 print editions.

(45) . Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica, 929: “Que aués de conzedearar que todo el mundo es de Dios y ancí Castilla es de los españoles y las Yndias es de los yndios y Guenea es de los negros. Que cada déstos son lexítimos propetarios, no tan solamente por la ley, como lo escriuió San Pablo, que de dies años estaua de posición y se llamaua romano.”

(69) . Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica, 751, 991: “Lo tendrá en el archibo del mundo como del cielo, en el catretral de Roma para memoria y en la cauesa de nuestra cristiandad de nuestra España, adonde rrecide Sacra Católica Real Magestad, que Dios le guarde en España, cauesa del mundo:” “ací escribo esta historia para que sea memoria y que se ponga en el archibo para uer la justicia.”

(34) . Ibid., 90. The Portuguese shared the view that possession was the crux of the matter. The crown proposed that the two sides agree to suspend voyages to the Moluccas while the question of ownership and possession was under consideration. But the Portuguese also allowed that if the lawyers should determine possession before issuing “a final sentence” on the question of ownership, then whoever was recognized as holding possession ought to be allowed to undertake voyages. (“Draft of an unconcluded treaty between Spain and Portugal, 1526,” Document 14, Davenport, European Treaties, 140–141).

(26) . Cortés, Pizarro, and other conquistadors used the founding of towns and other rituals, including raising banners, as acts of possession, often in response to threats by other Spanish officials seeking to position themselves as having first laid claim to particular regions in the name of the king. Examples include Cortés’s founding of Segura de la (p. 39 ) Frontera as he eyed the approach of a rival force off the coast of New Spain, and the many references to ceremonies of possession under similar circumstances in the conquest of Peru. See Pedro de Cieza de León, ed., The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13, 125, 295, 298, 319, 351. Cf. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, chap. 4.

(53) . A few pages later, the author reverses this argument to say that just because Spanish ships sail in Portuguese waters in the estuary does not signify an act of possession “because otherwise it would be considered an act of possession” any time a ship entered a harbor for supplies or to take shelter from a storm. The Dutch, French, and English, under this logic, would also be able to claim possession in the Rio de la Plata. Rela, Portugal p. 165.

(20) . Some English legal practices also reinforced an emphasis on possession. The need for written records to establish possession of property in sixteenth-century England influenced understandings of rights and privileges as defined by charter. And familiarity with canon law encouraged use of language mimicking papal (and Iberian) claims. James Muldoon, “Discovery, Charter, Conquest, or Purchase: John Adams on the Legal Basis for English Possession in North America,” in Christopher Tomlins and Bruce Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 25–46.

(71) . A policy that included the appointment of two Indian commissioners in the mid-1750s, and the announcement of the Royal Proclamation in 1763. On the strength of the settler opposition to the Crown’s desire to protect indigenous rights, see Daniel Richter, “Native Americans, the Plan of 1764, and a British Empire that Never Was,” in Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, eds., Alan Tully and Robert Olwell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 269–292.

(59) . Williams, Te Kooti Tango Whenua, 73–74. Saying that “a distorted version” of Māori custom was “invented” by the court implies that its jurisprudence was more coherent than it was. Grant Young has argued convincingly that the widespread belief that the court (p. 222 ) systematically applied four take to the cases that came before it derives from an influential twentieth-century text that retrospectively imposed order on “nineteenth-century chaos.” “There were no clear and fixed rules defining ‘take’ and when they might apply to certain circumstances.” Cases became increasingly complex and could appear sui generis. The court’s judgments were not formally reported, which hindered the development of a system of precedent. (Young, “Judge Norman Smith,” 329–330.) However, the fact that the court did not develop its own consistent and procrustean version of Māori custom does not, of course, mean that it followed “Native custom and usage.”

(51) . Here the Portuguese were reacting to a Spanish story about the Solís voyage that merged accounts from chronicles, subsequent altered versions, and hearsay into a more definite narrative about Solís’s acts of possession. See Gustavo Verdesio, Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), chap. 1.

(32) . On Spelman as Sir Henry Spelman’s nephew, see the will of Francis Saunder (1613) in Philip Alexander Bruce, “Virginia gleanings in England,” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography XV (1907/8), 304–306. Saunder left money and goods to all of Henry Spelman’s brothers, sisters, and cousins (the children of Sir Henry), and yet he “exempted” Henry, who apparently had not yet been forgiven for the sin that drove him to Virginia. See also: Jamestown Voyages, vol.1, 5; Strachey, Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, 46.n.4; and Kupperman, Jamestown, 232. Brown, Genesis of the United States, vol. 2, 1020–1021; and Edward Arber, Works of Captain John Smith, vol. 1, ci, mistakenly recorded Spelman as the third son of the antiquary.

(42) . On the development of the idea of the modern state, see Quentin Skinner, “From the state of princes to the person of the state,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 368–413; and Quentin Skinner, “A genealogy of the modern state,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162, 2009, 325–370.

(p. 84 ) (60) . Toledo insisted: “Los de Chiapa era el coraçón de los más frailes de este reino”; see Roberto Levillier, Gobernantes del Perú: cartas y papeles, siglo XVI, 14 vols. (Madrid: Juan Pueyo, 1921–1926), vol. 4, 442, 462; idem, vol. 5, 312, 405.

(36) . The settlement was part of the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza, which fixed the antimeridian of the Treaty of Tordesillas demarcation line at 297.5 leagues to the east of the Moluccas. The Spanish crown reserved the right to repay the Portuguese and revisit the agreement if new geographic information surfaced. Brotton notes that the treaty stipulated the joint creation of a map by a team of cosmographers under oath, with the map serving as “a type of visual contract.” Brotton, Trading Territories, 136.

(88) . Jenny Pulsipher suggests in a recent article that in the early eighteenth century the Wabanakis viewed the English king as a “paramount sachem” who offered protection in return for loyalty, but without interfering in the tribe’s “local governance.” According to Pulsipher, this was not inconsistent with indigenous claims to be subjects of the Crown. See Pulsipher, “‘Dark Cloud Rising from the East’: Indian Sovereignty and the Coming of King William’s War in New England,” The New England Quarterly LXXX (2007), 592.