The Monroe doctrine as a declaration of terra nullius: Caitlin Fitz, ‘The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas’, Diplomatic History, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

The Monroe doctrine as a declaration of terra nullius: Caitlin Fitz, ‘The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas’, Diplomatic History, 2023

25Jul23

Excerpt: In 1823, towards the end of Latin America’s independence wars, U.S. President James Monroe famously told Europe to stop messing around in the Americas. No new colonies, he warned, and no political meddling. The “political system” of monarchical Europe, he explained, was “essentially different” from that of the increasingly republican Americas; Europeans should mind their own business, and people in the United States would mind their own in return. Monroe devoted most of his address to what he twice called “the civilized world”—namely, the United States, Europe, and newly independent Spanish America. But those “civilized” powers, in turn, were fixated on their ostensibly uncivilized counterparts. Indeed, between the lines of Monroe’s message to Congress was a foundational geopolitical fact that scholars of the Monroe Doctrine have seldom if ever made explicit: in 1823, most of the Western Hemisphere was under Indigenous command. From the Amazon to the Arctic and from Patagonia to the Great Plains, Indigenous powers ruled most of the hemisphere’s inhabitable terrain even after centuries of European colonization and decades of transatlantic independence wars. Monroe’s mind was occupied by “the American continents,” as he called them; those continents, in turn, were occupied largely by Indigenous powers.

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