Abstract

A common understanding of what was wrong with colonialism was that it involved the theft of land and resources from indigenous peoples, accompanied in most cases by flagrant violations of rights to their bodily integrity. It is therefore natural to assume that libertarianism is theoretically well equipped to account for these wrongs. In this chapter I argue that although this assumption about libertarianism’s ability to condemn colonialism is correct, the path to this verdict is not as straightforward as it might seem. Indeed, as I show, historically, some libertarians—and many early modern liberal theorists—were colonial apologists who argued that Lockean theories of territorial rights supported, rather than condemned, colonial projects.