Charting the Doctrine in the Colonial Archive: Papal Bulls and the Translation of the ‘Discovery’ Purpose

“Charting the Doctrine in the Colonial Archive: Papal Bulls and the Translation of the,” an Outcome archive entry by Sebastian Modrow. The entry belongs to the jcrt collection and connects readers to scholarship, public history, and organizing around the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian domination, Indigenous sovereignty, law, religion, land, memory, and accountability.

In brief, it addresses Modrow shows how papal bulls transformed crusade theology into global colonial strategy, legitimizing Indigenous dispossession and imperial expansion.. For readers arriving from the main Doctrine of Discovery site, this post functions as a pointer rather than a replacement for the full Outcome record. The canonical page preserves the complete context, metadata, author information, citation links, media, and neighboring materials in the archive.

The source text highlights terms and contexts including The following chapter is intended to give an overview over the role and function of a particular set of papal bulls that together helped define the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, an ideology that, as a precursor of international law, helped define the rules of European colonial conquest. The chapter will explain the evolution of this Doctrine as a dialectical process between worldviews and positions of the papacy and the Iberian monarchies and the progressing results of the ‘discovery’ process, that is, the early process of European overseas expansion. Through selective close reading of the bulls’ texts, I will then focus on the bulls’ central contribution to the DoCD, which I see. Read the canonical Outcome page for the complete entry.

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