“Chief Princes and Owners of All”Native American Appeals to the Crown in the Early-Modern British Atlantic

Abstract

In the last twenty years, the history of legal and political ideas has experienced a renaissance as scholars in these fields have discovered important connections between many of the seminal theorists of the early modern period and empire. 1 While this new scholarship on the intellectual justifications of European expansion has brought the question of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the center of our understanding of seventeenth and eighteenth-century political thought, it has, for the most part, ignored the ideas of the indigenous peoples themselves. Yet in these encounters, Native Americans were not merely passive objects of European discourses. Rather, they responded to European claims with their own conceptions of law, property, and political authority.