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>Legalizing the Imagination: An Examination of How the Geographic Imagination of the New World led to its Construction as Free Space within International Law for the Purpose of the English Appropriation of North America.
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Legalizing the Imagination: An Examination of How the Geographic Imagination of the New World led to its Construction as Free Space within International Law for the Purpose of the English Appropriation of North America.
In this thesis I utilize the concepts of concepts of space, free space, the geographic imagination, and discovery to argue that the English geographic imagination, from the mid-1500s to the late-1600s, produced knowledge of the Americas. This knowledge played a key role in legitimating, naturalizing and legalizing appropriation and colonization. Maps, descriptive geographies, and international legal texts are examined to illustrate the manner in which the spatial identity of the Americas was constructed as free space, open for appropriation and exploitation, while simultaneously positioning Europe as the site of civilization, closed to appropriation. Through imaginative processes and the plantings of people, agriculture and law there was a transformation of the Americas from a free space to a geographically and legally bound space. The goal is to illustrate the manner in which early international law legitimated the existence of spaces beyond the dictates of the international legal order.
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