Bruce Alexander Buchan

Savagery and Civilization From Terra Nullius to the ‘Tide of History’

This article argues that the colonization of Australia was justified by denying that Indigenous peoples possessed recognizable societies, law, property rights or sovereignty. This denial, in turn, rests upon the supposition that Indigenous Australians were living in a ‘savage’, pre-civilized state: the state of nature of liberal theory. Such concepts, deeply embedded in western political thought, informed the view that Australia was a terra nullius or unowned land. Consequently, the contrast between ‘savagery’ and its counterpart, ‘civilization’ formed a critical element of colonial arguments that Australia could be colonized without either a war of ‘conquest’, or making a treaty. We argue here that more than 14 years after the rejection of terra nullius in Australian law, its legacy and the assumptions that underpinned it persist in the concepts more recent debates deploy as well as in the concept of terra nullius that some of these debates rehabilitate.

The empire of political thought: civilization, savagery and perceptions of Indigenous government

This paper examines the relationship between understandings of Indigenous government and the development of early-modern European, and especially British, political thought. It will be argued that a range of British political thinkers represented Indigenous peoples as being in want of effective government and regular conduct due to the absence of sufficiently developed property relations among them. In particular, British political thinkers framed the ‘deficiencies’ of Indigenous people by ideas of civilization in which key assumptions connected ‘property’, ‘government’, and ‘society’ as the attainments of civilized polities and societies. Accordingly, Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere were perceived to live in associations (rather than ‘societies’) bound by custom and tradition (rather than ‘government’). The paper will thus identify conceptual connections made between property, polity, and sovereignty in European and British political thought, and argue that such understandings provide a useful resource for understanding colonial attitudes to Indigenous people in Australia down to the present day.

Civilisation, Sovereignty and War: The Scottish Enlightenment and International Relations

In recent international relations (IR) literature and foreign policy, the concept of civilisation has enjoyed a surprising revival. Its recent use, however, has had little reference to those who did most to introduce it into modern thought, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. A re-examination of their thought suggests the need for a more nuanced view of civilisation, one that appreciates that the promise of domestic peace that comes with civilisation is also laden with the peril of war and new dynamics of international order. This article will focus on how David Hume (1711–76), William Robertson (1721–93), Adam Smith (1723–90) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) framed their understanding of civilisation and the civilising process in Europe. It will be argued that they were animated by the need to identify the processes at work in reshaping Europe, giving rise to a new international order of civilised societies and mighty sovereign states. Civilisation thus emerged as a process not simply of domestic refinement and pacification, but of the emergence of a new kind of international order between militarily powerful, ‘civilised’ and ‘civilising’ sovereign states with enhanced capacities for waging war.

Subjects of Benevolence: Concepts of Society and Civilisation in Early Colonial Indigenous Administration

The concept of society was understood to be an artefact of a process of civilisation and hence was used as a key criterion to differentiate the civilised European from the uncivilised Indigenous inhabitants. It is argued that understanding the history of this central concept in Western social science and political theory required an acknowledgement of its development within the colonial and imperial context.

Pandours, Partisans, and Petite Guerre : Two Dimensions of Enlightenment Discourse on War

During the Enlightenment period a certain notion of war came to prominence in European thought. This notion, which I here refer to as ‘civilized war’, centred on the idea that European war-making in the eighteenth century was characterised by humanity and honour. This image of European war-making was sustained by a variety of intellectuals and even some military practitioners who reflected not only on the practice of war in Europe in this period, but on the practice of war among supposedly less ‘civilised’ peoples in other parts of the world and in Europes barbaric past. In these other places, among other peoples, and at other times, warfare was characterised as altogether less ‘civilised’, less ordered, less humane and honourable, and was thus considered more ‘savage’. I will argue in this paper, however, that there were at least two dimensions to the Enlightenment discourse on civilised war: the first dimension stressed the moral qualities of civilised war, its honour and humanity above all; the second dimension emphasised its technical or rational qualities that gave European war-makers a decisive military advantage over non-European war-makers. These two dimensions applied to conventional or symmetrical war between sovereign militaries contending by massed fire power on the field of battle. They were less easily applicable to petite guerre, that is, unconventional, asymmetric or partisan war. Here, the two dimensions of the idea of civilised war were shadowed by persistent anxieties about the status of both dimensions of civilised war.

The subject of war, from Salamanca to Sydney Cove

Australias colonisation by Britain (from 1788) was accomplished without the ‘consent’ of the Indigenous inhabitants, or the negotiation of any kind of treaty. The violence of the colonisers against the Indigenous inhabitants was never officially acknowledged to be a form of ‘conquest’ or ‘war’. This was in part due to the fact that the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia were not regarded by the colonisers to be subjects against whom a war could be waged. Australias early colonisation offers an example of the conceptual myopia in the development of European discourses of international relations. Within these discourses, warfare was seen as an increasingly disciplined form of violent engagement between the subjects of sovereign states. European thinkers thus came to see ‘the subject’ of war as a self-disciplined, rights-bearing individual inhabiting a civil space underwritten by relations of private property and guaranteed by the sovereign state. In this way, the subject of war was differentiated from the undisciplined violence of non-subjects – those in rebellion against their sovereign, or those who were without sovereignty altogether. By the eighteenth century, this constellation of concepts was framed by notions of civilisation which tied the subject of war to an historicised account of the difference between supposedly ‘civilised’ societies and so-called ‘savage’ peoples. In this paper I will argue that notions of civilisation are central to our understanding of the development of IR discourse.

From Baratteria to Broglio: The Perils of Public Office in Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought

The predominance of an Augustinian account of degenerative corruption in learned Medieval discourse traced corrupt, corrupting or corrupted phenomena to the corruption of human nature after The Fall. This does not mean that contemporaries were unable to address forms of public office corruption, whether in the form of simoniacal purchase of Church offices or the use of gifts to curry judicial favour. Nonetheless, the privileged position of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe ensured that the Augustinian connotation of the spiritual and physical decay of the human body powerfully shaped Medieval discourse on corruption, such that instances of public office corruption were interpreted as the inevitable consequence of the corruption of human nature.1

Conceptions of Political Corruption in Antiquity

It is a commonplace of the literature on corruption that modern usage of the term — denoting the use of public office for private (pecuniary) gain — has substantially changed from Ancient Greek, Roman and Medieval usages. The Ancient Greeks and Romans certainly talked about the problems of bribery or buying judicial decisions, activities we would not hesitate to describe as acts of corruption, but they were often framed by concerns about moral corruption, something largely missing from late modern and contemporary discourse. Corruption for us represents a form of conduct, such as bribery, in which an individual or group acts in such a way as to exploit public office for personal gain.1 Corruption may also be applied to a whole regime or polity in which the principles of public office are systematically distorted to favour particular groups or factions. The connotation of moral degeneracy is certainly a feature or an implication of contemporary understandings of corruption, though it tends to be overshadowed by concerns about market distortion or lack of governmental probity and transparency. For the Ancient Greeks and Romans, however, the understanding of corruption also imbibed notions of utter destruction, perversion, decay or ruin.2 This imagery became even more striking when overlaid by Judeo-Christian associations between corruption and death, and by the pervasive influence of the metaphor of the body politic, as will be shown in the following chapters.

Ideological Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Early Modern discourse incorporated a wide variety of concepts of corruption, ranging from the distortion of judgement and the abuse of office due to personal gain, gift giving or bribery, through to generalised fears of physical or moral decay1 We argue in this chapter that the volume of discourse about corruption reached a peak in Britain in the eighteenth century, and that much of this discourse came to focus more tightly on public office corruption. Although the idea that public office corruption might be a symptom of a more general, degenerative form of corruption was still very much alive, complaints about public office corruption became louder and more common. As a consequence, understandings of corruption underwent significant refinement, and along with them, understandings of what a properly functioning polity should look like.

Affection, Interest and Office in Early Modernity

Conceptualising corruption as a process of degeneration enabled two broad forms of usage in Medieval and Early Modern discourse. First, corruption could be used to describe the process of moral or physical decay of animate beings, possibly even including the degeneration of the earth and the cosmos itself. Second, corruption might also be used to describe the terminus of this process of decay, the state of death or utter destruction to which the process of decay inevitably led. Complicating this categorisation was that both of these usages could also be applied in descriptions of the moral vitiation of a person or a whole community, and the political debility or decline of nations and empires.1 A further complication was that the moral and political connotations of degenerative corruption were often linked to widespread acts of public office corruption, that is, the abuse of public (secular or Church) offices. The apparently divergent understandings of degenerative and public office corruption were also connected by prevailing assumptions about the correspondences between the divine structure of the cosmos, the hierarchies of nature, the rightly ordered society and the well-proportioned body of a human being. As Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) put it, ‘in the little frame of man’s body there is a representation of Universall, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts thereof’.2