Making All the World America: Native Information and the Doctrine of Discovery

A provocative new account of the ideological framework undergirding early modern imperial expansion: the Doctrine of Discovery

Making All the World America offers a new account of the ideological framework undergirding early modern imperial expansion: the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that the first arrival of a European power among the lands and peoples of the Western Hemisphere granted the right to govern the regions that they claimed to have “discovered.”

While scholars have maintained that the doctrine operated through the suppression of Indigenous peoples, Timothy Bowers Vasko contends that, on the contrary, the doctrine’s ideological work actually depended on the recognition of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Between 1492 and 1690, the Spanish and English architects of the doctrine sought to justify European-Christian empire through the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into colonial frameworks as religious, political, property-owning subjects. Examining the works of Peter Martyr, Thomas More, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Richard Hakluyt, and John Locke, among others, Vasko shows how these theorists leveraged and referenced knowledge of Indigenous societies and religious traditions in the Americas as a way of legitimizing imperial claims to the Americas. The doctrine’s reliance on this production of Native information enabled the emergence of a new class of Indigenous intellectuals such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who provided essential ethnographic material and exercised considerable influence on Western thought―especially the political theory of John Locke―in surprising and overlooked ways.

Providing a provocative explanation of impasses and frustrations within struggles for Indigenous rights and the critique of imperialism more broadly, Making All the World America shows how “the native” was not eliminated but rather produced by colonial power.