NATIVE CLAIMS – INDIGENOUS LAW AGAINST EMPIRE 1500-1920. Ed Saliha Belmessous Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2012. vii + 278 pp. ISBN 9780199794850. £47.50.
| Published date | 01 January 2013 |
| Author | P G McHugh |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2013.0147 |
| Pages | 109-111 |
Historians have long known that the format and patterns by which indigenous people engaged the arriviste colonialist polity were as much shaped by tribal traditions and customs as by unilateral imposition. Tribal societies quickly experienced, grasped and adapted to the ways of the arriviste polity as well as setting their own terms in the initial and early stages of contact. White dominance was not immediate, and could not have been achieved without indigenous peoples’ assistance and cooperation at the precarious outset of colonialism. Necessarily, mutual acknowledgement of one another's ways marked this early contact and was incorporated into the choreography of engagement. As the colonialist polity became more established tribal peoples invoked and deployed the new language and mechanisms of authority, its legalism most especially. This occurred not only with regard to longstanding intra- and inter-tribal contestation but also and increasingly against the polity itself, especially as settlement encroached more and more upon their lands and increasingly compromised the tribes’ capacity to control its negative impact. This helpful collection of essays is a reminder of tribal peoples’ historical agency and their claim-making against the imperial forces that eventually overpowered them and, Africa apart, reduced them to dependent status in their own lands. Collectively the essays reject strenuously and convincingly any tendency to depict the inter-cultural engagement as a matter of domination and subordination. All contributors stress the subtleties of context, affected by time, place and culture.
The essays cover a variety of imperial settings, with particular attention for the bulk to the Anglo one, encompassing colonial North America, New Zealand, pre-Confederation Australia, and West Africa (colonial Lagos). Three opening essays focus on the era of Iberian imperialism in Meso-America, mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lauren Benton's essay shows how the Roman law concept of possession wove through the legal politics of empire, but not as a precise concept so much as creatively and flexibly to the demands of inter-imperial rivalry and perceptions of indigenous peoples’ strategies. Her theme is not immediately that of indigenous agency so much as the inter-imperial sphere. Nonetheless she creates room for that agency by calling attention away from the usual fixation of historians with the concept of occupation (
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