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The extension of political sovereignty from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas constitutes one of the first and most consequential transatlantic relations in the modern era. This extension of sovereignty was not only spatial but temporal: it sought to create a paradigm that would allow territorial occupation to be considered the moral precondition for an ideology of paternalist tutelage that required rationalization after the appropriation of the new American territories. In this essay, Aching examines a line of disingenuous moral argumentation that made use of humanist thought, scholasticism, and just war theory to position and restrict an ideologically conceived notion of the "Indian" to a temporality of permanently arrested development, or what Aching refers to as the creation of the modern, colonial subject.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58208-5_4

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