The Doctrine of Discovery: How Five Papal Bulls Redrew the World, and Why the Map Still Holds (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798185812433)

In 2005, the Oneida Indian Nation bought back its own ancestral land, parcel by parcel, at full market price. The Supreme Court still said no.

To understand why, Justice Ginsburg had to reach back through two centuries of precedent to a 1823 case called Johnson v. M'Intosh - and from there, four centuries further, to five papal bulls issued by the bishops of Rome to the kings of Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century. Those documents invented a legal fiction: that Christian nations acquired sovereignty over any land they "discovered," regardless of who already lived there. It was never repealed. It became the load-bearing wall of property law on four continents.

The Doctrine of Discovery traces that fiction from Dum Diversas (1452) through Romanus Pontifex, the Inter Caetera bulls, and Dudum Siquidem, into the Requerimiento read aloud to people who couldn't understand it, into Manifest Destiny, terra nullius, the Berlin Conference's partition of Africa, and the plenary power doctrine still cited in U.S. courts today. It follows the popes who wrote it, the conquistadors who used it, the Indigenous nations who resisted it, and the recent, incomplete reckoning - Vatican repudiation, UN declarations, Land Back settlements - that has yet to fully undo it.

Drawing on primary sources and rigorously cited throughout, this is the definitive accessible history of the idea that licensed the conquest of the modern world - and the argument that its legal machinery, however renamed, is still running.