European Early Modern Colonial Law

April 28–29, 2025

This conference is closed to the public.

Scholarly engagement with European colonial law was mostly the product of nineteenth-century developments. Closely linked to the emergence of nation-states, lawyers working for these states strove to present colonial law as an efficient and logical tool to manage overseas territories. Meanwhile, historians invoked colonial law mainly to justify, sometimes even glorify, what had transpired. Following early modern discussants, they engaged in bizarre discussions regarding which of the European colonial powers was less violent and/or more benign. Were Spanish conquistadors more ruthless than English settlers? Were the Dutch and the Portuguese merely conducting commercial activities or were they building empires? And who accommodated better to local conditions, or instituted enslavement in ways that were more “humane”?  
 
Until the mid-twentieth century, jurists and historians who engaged with these issues mainly paid attention to European wishes, projects, and actors. It was as if the colonized were either nonexistent or a hindrance to the "correct" implementation of the law. Their general assumption was that colonial law consisted of a unitary and systematic body of regulations developed by the authorities specifically to cater for overseas rule, which was distinct from the law of rival empires. Colonial law, in other words, formed part of the national heritage, which, depending on country and time, was mostly viewed favorably, being considered a glorious enterprise that demonstrated the achievements of that particular European state.    
 
Though some of these visions are still prevalent in some sectors, since the mid-twentieth century, many scholars began uncovering “the darker side of the Renaissance.” They traced to empire the birth of racism and enslavement, as well as the emergence of many other things that in the past were considered positive, but are presently questioned, such as modernization, capitalism, nationalism, and private property. Those who pursued this road also sought to uncover the dispossession and violence unleashed by empire and describe the ways by which colonialism benefitted both the colonists and their European states.  
 
More recently, historians have called our attention to the need to historicize and contextualize colonial law. Partly the result of debates internal to the field of legal history—where law is no longer equated with legislation—partly influenced by new conversations in the fields of colonial and imperial history, partly the consequence of profound social and political transformations, in the last few decades historians have begun asking whether our image of colonial law as developed in the nineteenth century makes sense. They wondered whether a law that was specifically colonial ever existed, whether it was nationally bound or pan-European, and whether it was different when applied to different locations and continents. They also debated what should be included in its study. Many now argued that, to understand colonial realities, we must move to recognize the presence and importance of non-European legalities. We must also look to debates that crisscrossed empires, and the way by which the experience of one might have affected the experience of others.   
 
This questioning opened the road to asking what law was implemented in the colonies, who made and applied it, how different legal systems interacted, and whether there is a larger story to tell beyond dividing colonial law into Portuguese, French, and Spanish colonial law, and so forth. In other words, it is now possible to ask how would dismissing Eurocentric and nationalist narratives help us understand better the past.  

Cosponsored by the University of Helsinki, Scuola Superiore Meridionale, and I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.