The genealogy of Terra Nullius

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 129, 2007, Pages 1-15

  Fitzmaurice, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149541449     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610708601228     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. See David Ritter, 'The "Rejection of terra nullius" in Mabo: A Critical Analysis', Sydney Law Review 18, no. 1 (1996)
2. Kate Beattie, 'Terra Nullius and the Colonisation of Australia' (BA Honours thesis, University of Sydney, 1998)
3. Michael Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius: Historical and Legal Fictions on the Foundation of Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005)
4. Bain Attwood, 'The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land?: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society', History Compass 2 (2004): 1-30
5. Merete Borch, 'Rethinking the Origin of Terra Nullius', Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 117 (October 2001): 222, Iff, acknowledges Ritter's point but prefers to use terra nullius as shorthand for a discourse of dispossession. Connor's recent attack on historians' use of terra nullius attracted media attention for having unmasked the myth but on that score he added nothing that Ritter had not already pointed out in his 1996 article. Clearly, the excitement generated in some quarters by Connor's work rests not upon the putative unmasking of terra nullius but upon a change in political context
6. See Ritter; Attwood; and Connor, Invention of Terra Nullius
7. Camille Piccioni, Revue generate de droit international public vol. XVI (1909): 118
8. James Brown Scott, 'Arctic Exploration and International Law', The American Journal of International Law 3, no. 4 (October 1909): 941
9. Frantz Despagnet, Cours de droit international public, 4th edn (Paris: Librarie de la Sociétié du Recueil Sirey 1910, 1st edn 1893), 590-1
10. Ernest Nys, he droit international vol. 2 (Brussels : M. Weissenbruch, 1912), 80
11. Ernest Scott, 'Taking Possession of Australia: The Doctrine of Terra Nullius (No-Man's Land)', Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society vol. XXVI, pt. 1 (1940), 1-19
12. Philip C. Jessup and Howard J. Taubenfeld, Controls for Outer Space and the Antarctic Analogy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959),see, for example, 18, 34-9, 181, 257-8
13. Geir Ulfstein, The Svalbard Treaty: From Terra Nullius to Norwegian Sovereignty (Oslo, 1995). In an article in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement ('Evidence Tailored to Fit an Argument', 15 March 2006) I claimed the origin of the term terra nullius was in the polar regions debate (following the sources above) and the earliest reference I could find in that debate was in 1909 by Piccioni. Michael Connor helpfully responded that the 28 August 1899 edition of The Times contained a reference to terra nullius in the context of the Venezuela Arbitration (see Michael Connor, 'Null Truth to Academic Accusations', The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 5 April 2006
14. (see Michael Connor, 'Null Truth to Academic Accusations', The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 5 April 2006
15. and The Times Digital Archive, 28 August 1899). Indeed, an even earlier reference can be found in 1885 in relation to the conflict between Spain and the United States over the Contoy Islands in 1850: Herman Eduard von Hoist, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, trans. J. Lalor from the German edition of 1877-92, vol. 4 (Chicago: Callaghan, 1885), 51. Hoist claims that 'Barringer, the American ambassador at Madrid, was unquestionably right when he said that Contoy was not, in an international sense, a desert, that is an abandoned island and hence terra nullius'. While Barringer's 1850 correspondence reveals, however, the use of the natural and Roman law doctrine of the first taker, it does not contain the term terra nullius: see, 'Barringer to Pidal', Madrid, 19 September 1850, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs vol. XI, 'Spain' (Washington, 1939): 557. (I would like to thank David Armitage for assistance with this reference.) The precise origin of the term could take some more months of research to discover. Sources that point to the polar regions debate as the origin cite diplomatic correspondence between Sweden and Russia over Spitzbergen dating from 1871
16. see Ulfstein, The Svalbard Treaty, 36-7. But while that 1871 correspondence contains a statement of the law of the first taker applied to the island it does not contain the term terra nullius
17. For the pre twentieth-century history of Spitzbergen, see René Waultrin, 'La question de la souveraineté des terres arctiques'. Revue générale de droìt international public vol. XV (1908): 78-125
18. Camille Piccioni, Revue générate de droit international public vol. XVI (1909): 118, my translation
19. See, for example: Connor, Invention of Terra Nullius, 12
20. See Sir Ernest Scott, 'Taking Possession of Australia-The Doctrine of Terra Nullius (No-Man's Land)', Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society vol. XXVI, pt. 1 (1940), 1-19
21. Philip C. Jessup and Howard J. Taubenfeld, Controls for Outer Space, see, for example, 18, 34-9, 181, 257-8
22. See also Philip C. Jessup, The Use of International Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Law School, 1959), 148-9
23. Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 140
24. J. A. C.Thomas, ed., The Institutes of Justinian (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1975), Bk II, i, 11-12
25. See also Theodore Mommsen, ed. The Digest of Justinian, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 487a: 'what presently belongs to no one becomes by natural reason the property of the first taker [Quod enim nullius est, id ratione naturali occupanti conceditur]'
26. Francesco de Vitoria, 'On the American Indians', in Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 264
27. Christian Wolff, Jus Gentium Methodo Scientificia Pertractatum, 2 vols, trans. Joseph H. Drake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 2, 159
28. For an example of this anachronistic reading of Vitoria, see: Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
29. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
30. On the shift from the negative use of natural law by the School of Salamanca to defend Indigenous rights to Locke's use of natural law to justify colonisation, see: Andrew Fitzmaurice, 'Moral Uncertainty in the Dispossession of American Indians', in Virginia and the Atlantic World, ed. Peter Mancal (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute for Early American History, 2007)
31. See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1996, see for example 'The doctrine of right', Part 1, 'Private Right', Chapter 1, Section 6, sub-section 250-1, 'Postulate of practical reason with regard to rights': 'it is possible for me to have any external object of my choice as mine, that is, a maxim by which, if it were to become law, an object of choice would in itself (objectively) have to belong to no one (res nullius) is contrary to rights ⋯'' (I would like to thank Duncan Ivison for this reference.)
32. Martens, Précis, 65
33. See, for example, Frantz Despagnet, Cours de droit international public, 598: 'A territory reigned by a sovereign barbarous even and organised in a rudimentary manner must not be regarded as res nullius' (my translation)
34. See also Frantz Despagnet, Essai sur les protectorats (Paris: Librarie de la Société du Recueil Général des Lois et des Arrêts, 1896), 243
35. Gaston Jèze, Etude théorique et pratique sur l'occupation (Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière, 1896), 121-4
36. Ernest Nys, he droit international vol. 2, 79-80
37. Édouard Engelhardt, 'Étude sur la déclaration de la conférence de Berlin relative aux occupations' Revue de droit international et de législation comparée vol. 18, 1886, 577
38. A. G. Heffter, Le droit international public de I'Europe (Paris, 1866), 133 and 141-3
39. Charles Salomon, L'occupation des territoires sans maître (Paris: A. Giard, 1889), 7
40. Salomon, L'occupation, 7; my translation
41. see Benjamin Constant, Œuvres, ed. A. Roulin (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1957). Rayneval complained that European colonisers had 'violated all the principles of natural law and the law of nations ⋯ upon which social order was founded in Europe'
42. see Gérard de Rayneval, Institutions du droit de nature et des gens (Paris: Leblanc, 1803), 2 vols, vol. 1, 367, 21ff). In his magisterial study, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 106-7, Martti Koskenniemi mistakes Jèze and Salomon as humanitarian apologists for colonisation possibly because he does not perceive their concerns about metropolitan liberty
43. There is a widespread notion that nineteenth-century jurists rejected natural law, and its universal understanding of rights, in favour of a nationalistic understanding of rights that was promoted through positivist codifications of law. According to this account universal understandings of rights would only be resurrected after the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust, notably in the 1948 UN Declaration of the Rights of Man (see, for example, Anthony Pagden, 'Human Rights, Natural Rights and Europe's Imperial Legacy', Political Theory 31, no. 2 (2003): 171-91). Most nineteenth-century accounts of law, and international law in particular, drew upon natural law and positivism and did not see any opposition between the two
44. See Koskeniemmi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations
45. For the use of Vitoria in discussions of colonial occupation, see, for example: Ernest Nys, Les origines du droit international (Brussels: Bohn, 1894), 129, see also 126-9
46. Ernest Nys, Etudes de droit international et de droit politique (Brussels: Alfred Castaigne, 1896), 126-7
47. Salomon, Inoccupation, 44
48. Frantz Despagnet, Essai sur les protectorats, 242
49. Henry Bonfils, Manuel de droit international public 7th edn (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1914), 382
50. Annuaire de l'institut de droit international vol. 10, 1889, 178. In 1926 M. F. Lindley argued that almost no lands occupied by Europeans had been territorium nullius (with the exception of Australia!) and for this reason he went to great lengths to prove that the vast majority had been acquired by treaty
51. See M. F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), 40-3. Treaty was, of course, yet another instrument of colonial occupation
52. Connor does not seem to appreciate that an absence of property implies an absence of sovereignty, see: Michael Connor, 'Null Truth', 28. He fails to understand that originally the difference between territorium and terra nullius was not that one applied to sovereignty and the other to property but that both referred to an absence of sovereignty while one acknowledged the existence of Indigenous property and the other did not
53. see William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 4 vols, 21st edn (London: Stevens and Norton, 1844), vol. 1, 107
54. The best recent analysis of the development of Locke's ideas in the context of his role as secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina is: David Armitage, 'John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government', Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602-27. For a recent discussion of Mill in the context of empire
55. see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)