Language, European

Language and empire were closely related, whether the quasireligious and legal language of papal donations concerning lands beyond Europe, or the speech and signs that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) described in his writings about first encounters with natives in the New World. European gestures and classical and vernacular languages from that continent are a key part of the story and history of expansion, colonization, and empire. Words are the traces we have of the European empires that begin in earnest with the Portuguese expansion into Africa in the fifteenth century, and that ended formally with decolonization, a process that began with the American War of Independence in the 1770s, and finally ended with similar wars in the twentieth century, as well as peaceful independence in parts of Asia and Africa (often in the British Empire).

The Spanish humanist, Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522), author of the first grammar of the Castilian language (1492), reached the conclusion in his preface to that work that "language always accompanies empire." Nebrija's classical statement is a point of departure for how a few European languages became world languages owing to imperialism. European speech and writing also transmitted the Western languages of politics, radicalism, journalism, education, law, history, and more. Some postcolonial scholars have advanced arguments that what was actually transmitted was the language of "Orientalism" (a Western discourse of misunderstanding and undervaluing colonial "others"), as well as racism, sexism, fascism, capitalism, and globalism.

LANGUAGE PRACTICES AND REPRESENTATIONS

Portuguese practices at home later became usual in colonies overseas. Legal language was particularly important in this regard. On May 26, 1375, King Ferdinand I (1345–1383) of Portugal published a law by which all rural landowners were to cultivate their lands or rent them for cultivation (Lei de Sesmaria), a practice that Portuguese colonies in Africa and Brazil adopted. In Portugal, black slaves replaced in the fields men who were overseas.

Brazil was to be a key colony for the Portuguese, who claimed it during Easter week of 1500 as recorded by Pero Vaz de Caminha, one of the crew of Pedro Álvares Cabral (ca. 1467–1520). This same writer uses the power of language to represent themes that Columbus had expressed about the New World—the innocence that makes the natives ready to convert, the nakedness of the inhabitants, and the native signs that indicate gold and other riches, the will of God, and salvation. One curious passage in Caminha's account is that he has no doubt that if the degradados (banished Portuguese criminals) learned the natives' language then these new-found peoples would come into the Christian faith. Early on, sign language and the learning of native languages was an important part of converting local populations abroad. Later, however, the use of European languages became part of a practice of assimilation or domination (in the root sense of having lordship over the tributary or vassal population of natives).

Apparently, Cabral did not write about his voyage to Brazil and India. Various sources help to piece together the events of this journey. The key source is an anonymous text, written in Portuguese but translated into Italian, that was included in one of the collections of voyages that were appearing in the first decade of the sixteenth century. In Lisbon in 1502 a volume was published that included descriptions of the voyages of Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324), Nicolò de Conti (ca. 1395–1469), and Hieronimo di (Geronimo da) San Stefano (a Genoese who traveled to Pegu in Burma in 1495–96) and a volume titled Paesi Nouamente retrouati et Nouo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio intitulato (Newfound Lands …) was published in Vicenza, Italy, in 1507. This last source provided an example for the collections of Simon Grynaeus (1493–1541) and Giambattista Ramusio (1485–1557) and, more indirectly, of Richard Hakluyt the Younger (ca. 1552–1616) and Samuel Purchas (1577–1626), a compiler of travel books whose work included this 1507 narrative. Language was not simply about individual texts but about editing, translating, collecting, printing, and reading them. There is a collective as well as an individual context. Translation ensured that all European states gathered strength and that their knowledge and languages were enriched.

A few years earlier, Columbus, as described in the "Letter of Columbus," which Columbus probably wrote in 1494 to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain about the "discovery," colonization and commerce of Hispaniola, remarked on how timid the natives were but then admitted that he took some of them by force and established a mutual understanding "by speech or signs." Before Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554–1618), Columbus used a language that identified the land in the New World as a woman and sometimes eroticized the female natives he encountered. The use of a language of signs, and the interpretation of those signs and of speech even before the Portuguese or Spanish learned the languages of the natives, represent the practice of traders but also may seem like overconfidence. From the beginning of the Iberian expansion, the language of gesture and of the spoken and written word became crucial in the enterprise. This passage from Columbus has implications that extend to this day.

The mediation of writing and reading seems to shape the images Columbus forms of the native after first contact. Perhaps it also has an effect on the transmission and editing of his account, as well as on the rhetorical relation between speaker or writer and audience, and between Columbus and the sovereigns (whom he has in mind and whom he addresses). This relation has a very material dimension, for Columbus proceeded to promise Queen Isabella (1451–1504) and King Ferdinand (1452–1516) of Spain vast riches and slaves in return for their "very slight assistance."

In this possible contract, in this quid pro quo, the natives are lost; they are transformed into slaves. These slaves, as many as sovereigns ordered to be shipped, would be chosen from the idolaters, so that Columbus could have a clear conscience and could, with a highly imperfect knowledge of the language and culture of the natives, decide who among them practiced idolatry and who did not. Slavery was fine for those whom Columbus considered to worship idols instead of Christ. Columbus and other Europeans choose to interpret others in the framework of their church and legal dogma. Who was a pagan, idolater, heretic, or infidel was a decision based on an interpretative context that papal bulls helped to forge. It was also encoded in "encounter" narratives and the many other written documents that represented European expansion into lands "discovered" or "rediscovered."

The precariousness of the expansion of European languages and empires is a key part of the story. There was a certain defensiveness in the offensive stance of Europe. The Iberian powers (Spain and Portugal) had been largely under Muslim rule for hundreds of years before the Christian kingdoms started to push the Muslims back. It took until 1492 for Spain to reconquer its territory, and the year of Columbus's first voyage to America, the Spanish Crown ordered the expulsion of Moors (Muslims) and Jews. The spread of Castilians and Portuguese involved the distinction between Portugal and Spain from each other, as well as the distinction between their languages.

DEFENDING THE NATIVES AND LEARNING AND PROTECTING THEIR LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

During the first three decades of the conquest (1492–1519), owing in part perhaps to the quick decimation of the natives, there was no Amerindian chronicler of the encounter. It was the Spanish Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) who rose to write a defense of the native population. Las Casas also defended the natives of the New World against the arguments of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573) at Valladolid, Spain, where in 1550 to 1551 King Charles I (1500–1558) convened theologians and philosophers. Stangely enough, Las Casas and Sepúlveda, who called on the Council for the Indies for the "debate" on colonization and the war against the American Indians, in the first instance, did not face each other, but read their arguments to a panel of theologians from the University of Salamanca. Las Casas insisted on a place for the Amerindians as members of a human civil society. The famous debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda for the benefit of the Spanish king over Aristotle's (384–322 b.c.e.) concept of natural slavery and whether it applied to the aboriginal inhabitants of the New World demonstrates the dissention from within. A debate based on distinctions in language was to determine whether natives were considered barbarian or even human.

The question of the European representation of native peoples also relates to the Amerindian representation of the European arrival in, and colonization of, America. One of the difficulties presented by preconquest native documents, as in the case to the Nahuas of central Mexico, is that even the most informative among them were mostly redone under Spanish influence during the 1540s and after. The Europeans and their American settlers frequently wrote about the natives from the vantage of conquest and triumph. Europeans also had a myth that the Amerindians had no writing, and when the Europeans encountered evidence of writing, they tried to eradicate it because it posed a threat to the Bible.

The represented also represent. Examples are the annals of the Valley of Mexico (1516–1525), a Tupi taunt of French missionaries in Brazil (1612), and a seventeenth-century Algonquin account of Europeans entering North America. The representation of the natives and the Amerindian representation of the Europeans have left evidence only in the wake of Columbus's encounter with the world of the western Atlantic.

TRANSLATION, IDEOLOGICAL EDITING, AND THE BLACK LEGEND

Writers and translators in France and England made ambivalent and contradictory use of the example of Spain's colonization of the New World from Columbus's first voyage to the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Translations of Spanish books about the New World, along with French and English texts on the same subject, suggest that historical changes occurred in the use of the example of Spain while, for the most part, ambivalence and contradiction remained. Legal and textual anxieties developed amongst the French and English over Columbus and Spain being the first Europeans to "discover" the "New World" and over the pope's division of that newfound land between Portugal and Spain. France and England tried to learn from Spain and to compete with it and circumvent its monopoly in the New World (1492–1547).

Texts in the period from the deaths of Henry VIII (1491–1547) of England and François I (1494–1547) of France to the year of the first narrative of the Spanish massacre of the French colonists in Florida (1548–1566) contain praise for Spain in England during the reign of Queen Mary I (1516–1558), as well as the first important French description of Spanish cruelty in the New World. In addition, the historian Richard Eden (ca. 1521–1576) used translation to advocate English colonization and then the imperial union of Spain and England.

Eyewitness accounts of the conflict between the French and Spanish in Florida—Thomas Hacket's (fl. 1560–1590) translation of Jean Ribault (ca. 1520–1565) (the original was lost) and Nicolas Le Challeux's narrative—also contributed to the debate on colonization. These are key texts with apparently different aims: Eden's work appears to be that of a champion of the potential alliance of England with Spain, whereas the Ribault and Le Challeux texts are French Protestant works that help to produce, in France and England, the Black Legend of Spain, an anti-Spanish attitude that blamed Spaniards for cruelty, greed, and fanaticism in their empire, especially in the Netherlands and the New World, in contrast with the White Legend (leyenda rosa or blanca), which idealized Spaniards. An analysis of these important texts suggests a shift in the representation of Spain in the 1560s, when the French and then the English, mainly because of the events in Florida and in the Netherlands, began to develop an intricate anti-Spanish rhetoric.

Having incorporated into the Spanish conquest of the New World the qualities of civility and virtú. Eden also followed Columbus in dividing the natives into good natives, or those who helped and acquiesced, and bad natives, or those who opposed the Europeans: the Spanish liberated the natives through religion and civility. Columbus represented the "bad natives" as cannibals and Amazons. The distinction between liberty and license, one that the English author John Milton (1608–1674) would later take up, is part of an imperial discourse in which the forces of empire liberate the indigenes from their primitiveness, barbarity, strife with treacherous neighbors, pagan beliefs, and laziness.

The imperial discourse of France and England would replicate this language of liberty for their own ends well into the twentieth century. Sometimes the French and English would cast the Spaniards as the treacherous party, as cannibals devouring the innocent natives. But the paternalism, Christian and secular, differed little from Eden's rendition on behalf of Spain. The narratives of the explorers included representations of the relations among the European imperial powers: Spain was still a powerful example that these practical French and English mariners contemplated. The captains and seamen wrote accounts of their experiences with the Spanish that were often framed in the language of romance and heroism but that frequently reflected what their own governments would tolerate or sanction unofficially.

Economic self-interest and the balancing of power in European politics affected these apparently straightforward narratives. Through their written accounts, explorers and pirates (depending on whether the reports were from the point of view of Spain or not), like John Hawkins (1532–1595) and Dominique de Gourges, justified their actions, the one for breaking Spanish laws and the other for wreaking revenge on Spain. English and French narratives were instrumental, their ends often being political and economic, even as they protested motives of religion and liberty.

From the mid-1550s, French and English translations were sending out mixed messages about the natives through Spanish eyes. In a history of discourse—and this applies in the historiography of expansion—translation is so central that there is sometimes a lag between event or original textual argument, representation, and its transmission into other languages. Latin was available to the elite, but most often the translation into Spanish and then into French and English or some variation on that process (Spanish to French, French to English) meant a greater and more popular dissemination than of the Latin original. Many Spanish authors decided to write in Spanish, and, for some, especially among the captains, adventurers, and settlers, the vernacular was the only option, or what might be called the confident option. Some of the texts on Spain were not French or English translations but were histories and narratives of exploration, encounter, and settlement that involved imitation of, allusion to, and commentary on Spain.

The example of Spain was central in determining English attitudes toward the New World and its inhabitants. In addition to Hakluyt, who translated or commissioned translations from the Spanish, other principal translators were Richard Eden, John Frampton (fl. 1577–1596), and Thomas Nicholas (b. 1530s). Even though the English adapted Spanish writings that glorified the Spanish conquest for their own purposes—providing propaganda to encourage potential investors and settlers—they often adopted Spanish representations of the New World and its natives. The "Spanish" authors most translated into English, such as Peter Martyr (1499–1562), Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1478–1557), and Francisco López de Gómara (ca. 1511–1566), emphasized the glory of Spain in the face of Native American betrayal and barbarism, even if they sometimes advocated conversion and condemned Spaniards for mistreating the natives.

Even though Las Casas thought the work of his compatriots in the New World was important, he was not one to emphasize Spain's colonization of the New World and its treatment of the natives as full of glory. Those Spanish authors who glorified Spain were the most often translated into English. Only one edition of Las Casas's Brevissima relación de la destruyción de las Indias (Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552) appeared in English (as The Spanish Colonie, 1583). This translation was filtered through the French translation from which the preface was taken. The preface encouraged support for the Dutch revolt against Spain.

Numerous translations of Spanish works concerning the New World also appeared in France. The French and English textual responses to the events in Brazil and Florida were staggered over the years, and this response complicated the way the Portuguese and Spanish texts moved into these languages (as well as into Dutch).

This historiography of expansion involved the production, dissemination, and reception of ideas about Spain. The earlier complaints against Spain were pale beside the propaganda that arose in the French and English languages from London through Amsterdam and Paris to Geneva. The anti-Spanish tracts of the 1560s and 1570s led up to the building of the Spanish Armada (1567–1588) and the intensification of rivalry with Spain as both France and England tried to expand and establish colonies. Columbus was to be a model and precedent, even in 1566 when the English navigator Humphrey Gilbert (ca. 1539–1583) planned to establish a colony in territory that Spain claimed.

In the wake of the Armada, works such as Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589) and Marc Lescarbot's L'Histoire de la Nouvelle France (The History of New France, 1609) demonstrate that the ambivalent and contradictory representation of Spain in the New World was not simply a matter of religion. Once France and England established permanent colonies in the New World and Spain began to decline, the sustained intensity of anti-Spanish sentiment abated into periodic eruptions of the Black Legend of Spain. Language in the original and in translation could be a political weapon.

The language of key texts expressed religious, legal, and political ideas for and against the expansion into the New World that occurred in roughly the first six decades after Columbus's landfall in the western Atlantic. These ideas and practices intertwined in the texts and documents of the period. The textual evidence suggests that the English, while quick to "discover" the North American continent, soon lost momentum and, for the period in question and beyond, the French made this northern part of America a priority. Before and after Columbus, whether in Spain, France, England, or other western European countries, the merits and demerits of expansion played an important role in legal, religious, political, and economic debates.

One of the chief means of spreading anti-Spanish sentiment among other nations was the use, against Spain, of the work of Las Casas, a critic of Spanish colonization but a supporter of the Spanish emperor and empire. Las Casas was a holy Spaniard who would never have approved of the use to which his work was put by these "heretics." The very ability the Spanish had in criticizing themselves became a weapon of intolerance and a tool to be used against an increasingly intolerant Spain. The French and English exploited Spain's self-criticism through vernacular translations, particularly of Las Casas. And Las Casas appeared in English-speaking countries as a weapon of propaganda late in the day. For instance, his account of the destruction of the Indies was printed four times in the period of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Language reproduces itself, persisting while changing shape.

LANGUAGE OF COLONIZATION, EMPIRE, LIBERTY, AND DECOLONIZATION

Las Casas had used language to defend the dignity and humanity of native peoples, although he was less concerned with the rights of African slaves. The spiritual dimension of the natives and their potential for conversion were mainstays of his argument. Contradictions, ambivalence, and opposition within the European states and their empires was expressed through language, so that Nebrija's yoking of language and empire is intricate.

In New England in the seventeenth century, John Eliot (1604–1690) acted as an apostle to the Indians and tried, by establishing communities of converts (fourteen towns, Natick being most notable among them), to allow them to pursue a Christian life. After King Philip's War (1675–76) between the English and the natives, the community was broken up and many of the Natick Indians deported to islands. Subscriptions from English parishes helped to enable that effort, as well as the establishment of the Harvard Indian College in 1655. Eliot also translated the Bible into the indigenous language (Algonquin in 1663). The natives themselves were torn between their own religion and language and the classical and vernacular European languages. This Eliot Bible was used as a means of converting the Indians, including by fellow educated natives, such as Harvard's first such graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck from the Wampanoag tribe (class of 1665). He lived with other students—English and native, in a dormitory called the "Indian College," founded under President Charles Chauncy and, as a result of neglect, torn down in 1698.

These residential schools continued well into the twentieth century, and there have been legal disputes over their negative effects in Canada. Mediators, such as La Malinche (Malintzin or Doña Marina, ca. 1505–ca. 1529) a Native American woman, most likely Nahua, from the Mexican Gulf Coast, acted as go-betweens. La Malinche accompanied Hernán Cortés (ca. 1484–1547), played a key role as an interpreter in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and was mistress to Cortés, whose son she bore. Another example of a mediator is Squanto (d. 1622), a Patuxet Indian who helped William Bradford (1590–1657) in Massachusetts. Translation also involved the transmission and transformation of native languages into European ones. One example of this is the codex in Broken Spears, a text often used in courses on colonization. The work is a collection of documents about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico by the Nahua (Mexicas or Aztecs) and translated into at least twelve languages. The debate here is whether the earliest of these documents were written in Nahuatl and how great the influence of the Spanish missionaries, their language and culture, were in this enterprise. Bernardino de Sahagún was a key figure in this translation and transculturation. Translation occurs between native and European cultures, but also between centuries.

Language is also about incommensurability and the abuse of power. The Requiermento (Requirement) was a document that the Spaniards read to natives, even though its language was incomprehensible to them, before massacring them. This warning was beyond understanding as an empty form that did not allow the natives to do as they should to protect themselves, and it served as a justification for what might be considered genocide today. The Requiermento might have been indebted to the jihad (holy war) that the Moors had used in the Iberian Peninsula; both were based on legal foundations.

Europeans tried to destroy or assimilate natives into their religion or language. Whether the last of the Mohicans or the last speaker of a dying language before the juggernaut of English, Portuguese, or Spanish, indigenous peoples since the expansion of European states have had to fight for their physical, cultural, and linguistic survival.

Conflicts between Europeans, and between natives and Europeans, are embodied and expressed through language. Recognition and misrecognition of empire, as well as the promotion of and opposition to empire, exist in language: empire and language are not simply linear or dual in their connection. For instance, Elio Antonio de Nebrija wanted Spain to teach Castilian Spanish and Christianity to the natives, but this view met with resistance. The mendicant friars and Jesuits preferred to write grammars of the indigenous American languages rather than teach the Indians Castilian.

It is ironic that, centuries later, Spanish became the language of nationalism in the construction of independent states in the former Spanish Empire in the Americas. In 1570 King Philip II (1527–1598) announced in a royal order that Nahuatl would be the official language of the natives in New Spain. Coloquios y doctrina christiana (Colloquies and Christian Doctrine, 1524) shows this linguistic contestation. This work, a dialogue between Mexican elders and twelve Franciscan friars in 1524, was transcribed by Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) in 1565 and involves mediation and transculturation. In this text, the Mexicas favor telling stories aloud, whereas the Spaniards prefer the letter and word as the foundation of understanding and knowledge.

The language of rights was as much a part of the quasilegal and legal framework as were the terms of papal donations and treaties. International law tried to set out a discourse of justice, liberty, and fairness, but also had to contend with conflict, slavery, and warfare. The Spanish legal scholar Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1483–1546) helped to call into question the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the New World. The Dutch attempted to come to terms with the law as they tried to supplant the Portuguese and Spanish in the East and West Indies. Mare Liberum (Freedom of the Seas, 1609) by the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) considered the freedom of the oceans, which was key for trade and conquest. Slavery, as well as expansion, was closely related to liberty.

The tension between slavery and liberty is a main theme in the language of the European empires. Gomes Eannes de Azuzara (ca. 1410–1473), a chronicler attached to Prince Henry (1394–1460) of Portugal, described how in 1444 the Portuguese landed 235 African slaves near Lagos in south Portugal. The language of slavery would become a key element in European empires, and above all the topic of African slaves would be essential to the development of the New World and the consequent riches of Europe.

In the seventeenth century, the slave trade in the English, Dutch, and French colonies had ambivalent beginnings. People favored and opposed it. It created great profits and problems. Texts proliferated. The novel Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688) by the British author Aphra Behn (1640–1689) represented ambivalence to slavery, and during the eighteenth century, this attitude became more widespread. Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) scorned the slave trade and disputed Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, which framed the language of many who had long justified slavery in the European empires. In 1758 Frei Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha, born in Portugal but resident in Brazil, produced a call for the abolition of slavery. The French writers Pierre Marivaux (1688–1763), Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) all circulated ideas about the liberation of slaves and about freedom generally.

During the American Revolution (1775–1783), both the British and the Americans began to abolish slavery. In the Declaration of Independence (1776), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) may have omitted a condemnation of slavery because of the pressure of some representatives from southern colonies whose commerce depended heavily on slavery. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) had written a dialogue in 1760 that revealed the injustices of slavery in Europe and America. When Abigail Adams (1744–1818) wrote to her husband, future American president John Adams (1735–1826), in September 1774, she considered slavery in Massachusetts an iniquitous scheme and saw the irony of fighting for freedom while depriving others of it.

The American poet Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784), kidnapped from Senegal-Gambia, fashioned poetry in English about her condition. Her work was published in London with the support of her masters. Some readers were shocked that an African could write in English, but there was also interest in her work.

Women's writing about slaves and slavery in the dying years of the American Revolution and in its aftermath suggests some of the complex emotions of white Americans and the Africans they represent. Some of the letters and diaries tell tales of contesting and conflicting forces within and between these European Americans and in the minds, hearts, and communities of African Americans. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) by the former slave Olaudah Equiano (ca. 1745–1797) was another text by an African-born writer in English, this time explicitly representing the abuses of the slave trade and slavery and advocating their abolition. In 1794, during the French Revolution (1789–1799), the convention of Paris declared the emancipation of slaves without abolishing the trade.

The language of slavery and freedom continued to be bound up with colonization and became part of the linguistic aspect of decolonization and independence. In 1820 the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) advised the Spanish to rid themselves of Ultramaria, their overseas colonies, and to grant these possessions independence. In this way, they would do what the United States had done, but their act would be a lesson to the United States and Britain by moving Spain entirely beyond benefiting from slavery.

The British started to use the language of antislavery as its empire expanded, so that the contradictions in the language of empire persisted. British policy in China was not about reform, even if it did concern the trade in and the holding of slaves. Even between 1856 and 1858, while concerns over slavery were still pressing in the British government, a second Opium War in China was being fought. Some, like Richard Cobden (1804–1865), a free-trader and a member of parliament for Stockport (part of the greater Manchester area that was the center of the cotton mills), thought Britain was being hypocritical as there was a gap between its language and action. While the government and those against slavery appealed to morality, Britain was the greatest seller to Brazil of textiles that were made from cotton, which slaves produced. At the same time, Britain refused to receive sugar, another product based on slave labor. The language of the debates in the British House of Commons revealed how intense were the feelings aroused by slavery.

In the United States, the language of the debate over slavery also suggested contradictions and hypocrisy. Frederick Douglass's (ca. 1818–1895) speech before the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in May 1854 underscored the ways African Americans were excluded from the rights and freedoms that the founders of the United States had set out. In his notes, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) thought that God might be punishing settlers of European backgrounds for enriching themselves through slavery. In a letter to James N. Brown in 1858, Lincoln said that he considered that the founders had included "the Negro" in the term "men" in their declaration of equality.

The language of slavery and freedom constituted a site of contestation in the rhetoric of the empire of liberty, as in Britain, and of the break with empire and decolonization in the United States. Abolitionists in the mother country and the former colony were still connected in their battle for the rights of slaves as part of a larger movement toward human rights, democracy, extended suffrage, and liberty.

The language of human rights in the debate over colonialism and decolonization continued into the twentieth century. The tensions between empires and colonies affected discourses and practices of freedom. If the Spaniards had made slaves of and decimated natives in the New World during the colonial era, the Nazis had enslaved and exterminated peoples in Europe during the twentieth century. In disbanding the substantial remains of the British Empire, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) called for an end of abuses and advocated for a sense of equality and freedom for all. Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), Martin Luther King (1929–1968), and Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) all looked to the education they had in the European tradition and used it peacefully to oppose, curtail, and attempt to end the violence of racism. Civil disobedience, as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) had advocated in the nineteenth century, was part of the striving toward freedom.

Just before and after World War I (1914–1918), opposition to imperialism grew more intense. Paradoxically, when these empires seemed most powerful, they declined. By 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) had established the Atlantic Charter, which set out the principles of self-government and liberty, opposition to the Nazis as forces of tyranny and slavery, and the right of self-determination for all peoples. The Soviet Union opposed what it saw as Anglo-American world domination or imperialism, whereas President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) came to see the Cold War as a struggle of freedom against slavery. The Eastern European states might have considered the Soviets as a new version of Russian imperialism. Point of view in matters of language is always a key factor.

World War II (1939–1945), even more than the first, had shattered the western European empires. Nationalism, which had been so developed in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spread globally. The so-called white man's burden or the Social Darwinist imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became diffuse and displaced. Language shifted to rights for all peoples in the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Discourses of multiculturalism and postcolonialism developed from the 1960s. That did not mean that discourses of nationalism, racism, and intolerance disappeared, but they found new challenges, especially in the official government ideology of Western democracies, including those that had held vast overseas empires for many centuries.

An example of the legacy of colonization illustrates the persistence and the language of empire. In Australia, the High Court judgments in the Mabo case, published in June 1992, involved the complaint of Eddie Mabo (1936–1992), a native of Murray Island in the Torres Strait, that the state of Queensland's annexation of the Torres Strait in 1879 had not legally extinguished his customary ownership of a part of Murray Island that his family passed on to him. Concerning the Mabo case, two judges of the High Court of Australia, William Deane and Mary Gaudron, questioned the quality of the doctrine of terra nullius—a Latin phrase that came from Roman Law, meaning "empty land," a concept the Portuguese had used in claiming Africa. In the Australian legal system the doctrine of terra nullius was confirmed in 1979 and rejected in 1992. The colonial persisted in the postcolonial: perhaps the postcolonial reinterpreted the colonial.

In Australia, as in the Americas, the legacy of Portuguese and Spanish expansion, which was also to be found in empires like those of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, was being reinterpreted in the years leading up to the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the Americas. The relation of settler and aboriginal cultures was being redefined in the courts. What constitutes property and what constitutes appropriation have become central questions in language, especially the language of rights and the law more generally.

Since about the mid-1980s, debates have intensified over whether we live in a neocolonial, rather than a postcolonial, age, and whether empires change their forms, as if the shape-shifting Greek god Proteus was one shape ahead of those that came after him. Ambivalence and contradiction remain in our use of language, as in the fifteenth century, when Europeans expanded and began their empires, however haltingly, in earnest.

see also Law, Colonial Systems of; Papal Donations and Colonization.

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