by PERRY ANDERSON

In 1929 lucien Febvre offered the first systematic reflection on the evolution of the meanings of the term ‘civilization’, from singular ideal, which he dated to the third quarter of the 18th century, to plural fact, which he placed at the close of the Napoleonic epoch. In 1944–45 he devoted his last lecture course to ‘Europe: genesis of a civilization’, and a year later added the word Civilisations to Économies et Sociétés in the title of the Annales journal itself. Just before he died, he penned a sharp note approving a colleague’s dismissal of Valéry’s famous dictum that this civilization had now realized it was mortal: ‘In fact, it is not civilizations that are mortal. The current of civilization persists across passing eclipses . . . Sober deflation of a windbag.’footnote1 A decade later, Fernand Braudel would concur: ‘When Paul Valéry declared “Civilizations, we know you to be mortal”, he was surely exaggerating. The seasons of history cause the flowers and the fruit to fall, but the tree remains. At the very least, it is much harder to kill.’footnote2
How far has Braudel’s confidence—that usage of the term in the singular was no longer of much significance—proved justified? One way of approaching this is to look at a body of thought and practice where ‘civilization’ was historically conspicuous, namely international law. There, we can start by noting what might appear a paradox. The contemporary notion of international law immediately evokes the idea of relations between sovereign states. In the West, these relations are generally held to have developed into something like a formal system for the first time with the Treaty of Westphalia, which in 1648 brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. It would seem logical to assume that a developed body of thought about international law would have arisen around this turning-point. In fact, however, to pinpoint its origins we must go back to the 1530s. It was then that its history really started, in the writing of the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, whose concern was not with relations between the states of Europe, of which Spain was at that time much the most powerful, but with relations between Europeans—preeminently, of course, Spaniards—and the peoples of the newly discovered Americas.
Foundations
Drawing on Roman notions of a ius gentium, or law of nations, Vitoria asked by what right Spain had recently come into possession of the larger part of the Western hemisphere. Was it because these lands were uninhabited, or because the Pope had allocated them to Spain, or because it was a duty to convert pagans to Christianity, if necessary by force? Vitoria rejected all such grounds for conquest of the New World. Did that mean it was therefore contrary to the law of nations? It did not, because when the Spaniards arrived in their lands, the savage inhabitants of the Americas had violated the universal ‘right of communication’—ius communicandi—that was an essential principle of the law of nations. What did such ‘communication’ mean? It meant freedom to travel and freedom to buy and sell, anywhere: in other words, freedom of trade and freedom to persuade, that is, to preach Christian truths to the Indians, as Spaniards called them. If Indians resisted these rights, the Spaniards were justified in defending themselves by force, building fortresses, seizing land and waging war against them in retribution. Should the Indians persist in their misdeeds, they were to be treated as treacherous foes, subject to plunder and enslavement.footnote3 The Conquests were therefore, after all, perfectly legitimate.
The first real building-block of what would, for another two hundred years, still be called the law of nations was thus constructed as a justification of Spanish imperialism. The second, still more influential, building-block came with the writing of Hugo Grotius in the early 17th century. Grotius is mainly remembered, and admired, today for his treatise on ‘The Law of War and Peace’—De iure belli ac pacis—of 1625. But his actual entry into international law, as we now understand it, began with a text that would come to be known as ‘On Booty’—De iure praedae—written twenty years earlier. In this document, Grotius set out a legal justification for the seizure by a captain of the Dutch East India Company, one of his cousins, of a Portuguese ship carrying copper, silk, porcelain and silver to the value of three million guilder, a figure comparable to the total annual revenue of England at the time—an act of plunder on an unprecedented scale, causing a sensation in Europe. In its fifteenth chapter, subsequently published as Mare Liberum, Grotius explained that the high seas should be regarded as a free zone for both states and armed private companies, and his cousin was well within his rights—so providing a legal brief for Dutch commercial imperialism, as Vitoria had for Spanish territorial imperialism.
By the time Grotius came to write his general treatise on the laws of war and peace, two decades later, the Dutch had become interested in colonies on land too, soon seizing parts of Brazil from Portugal, and Grotius now argued that Europeans had the right to wage war on any peoples, even if they were not attacked by them, whose customs they regarded as barbarous, as retribution for their crimes against nature. This was ius gladii—the right of the sword, or of punishment. He wrote: ‘Kings, and those who are invested with a power equal to kings, have a right to exact punishments not only for injuries committed against themselves, or their Subjects, but likewise, for those which do not peculiarly concern them, but are, in any persons whatsoever, grievous violations of the Law of Nature or Nations.’footnote4 In other words, Grotius offered licence to attack, conquer and kill whosoever stood in the way of European expansion.
To these two cornerstones of early modern international law, ius communicandi and ius gladii, were added two more justifications for colonization of the world beyond Europe. Thomas Hobbes proposed an argument from demography: there were too many people at home, and so few people overseas that European settlers in hunter-gatherer lands had the right, not to ‘exterminate those they find there; but constrain them to inhabit closer together, and not range a great deal of ground, to snatch what they find’footnote5—a straightforward programme for the reservations into which the native inhabitants of North America would eventually be driven. Obviously, if lands could simply be deemed unoccupied, even this would be unnecessary. To that widely held view, John Locke added the further argument that if there were local inhabitants on the spot, but they failed to make the best use of the land available to them, then Europeans had every legal right to deprive them of it, since they would fulfill God’s purpose for it by increasing the productivity of the soil.footnote6 With this, the repertoire of justifications for European imperial expansion was, by the end of the 17th century, complete; the rights of communication, of punishment, of occupation and of production all warranted seizure of the rest of the planet.
Limited to the civilized
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