henever Your Highnesses may command, all of them can be taken to Castile or held captive in this same island because with fifty men all of them could be held in subjection and can be made to do whatever one might wish.ģ.1 Back to the Roots or Trapped in Anachronism? I was attentive and labored to find out if there was any gold and I saw that some of them wore a little piece hung in a hole that they have in their noses. They brought balls of spun cotton and parrots and javelins and other little things that it would be tiresome to write down, and they gave everything for anything that was given to them. … They should be good and intelligent servants …. All of them are alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth and others of other things. … They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They were very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. It is shown that the roots of rights ideas are concrete moral judgments – for instance, about the injustice of a certain treatment – that are conceptualized in abstract terms, objectified, generalized over cases, universalized over persons and, ultimately, after long struggles, turned into explicit concepts of ethics and law. Human rights history has to include normative phenomena that are not human rights but paved the way to their development. It reconstructs manifestations of rights ideas in ancient sources, medieval ideas voiced during popular rebellions, the role of natural rights in the criticism of the subjugation of the Americas and the dawn of an explicit concept of human rights in the Enlightenment. It addresses in particular the evidence drawn from the documented experience of the victims of (European) human rights violations, including the experience of slavery. It argues that it is a mayor shortcoming of human rights history to neglect the rich normative world of indigenous societies. It discusses seeds and traces of ideas of rights about freedom and equality in indigenous societies. The chapter investigates predecessors of current concepts of human rights in history.
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