INTRODUCTION

From Late Antiquity the customs and institutions of hospitality facilitated the development of global connectivity. The institutional landscape of premodern Eurasia coalesced around customs of hospitality.

Wayfarers could expect to receive food and lodgings in the monasteries, hospitals, and fondacos that laced the pilgrimage and trade routes that criss-crossed Eurasia and interwove different world religions.^{^[565]} These institutions of hospitality provided sustenance for strangers in need. These strangers could be foreign travellers, merchants or pilgrims, or they could be the poor, who had become strangers in their own society through their poverty and were forced to look for support beyond family networks. However, while nominally providing simply for those in need, hospitality in fact provides a framework for the mediation of a variety of exchanges and, most importantly, facilitates the construction and legitimation of power asymmetries. As Derrida observed, hospitality is always conditional,^{^[566]} and, as this chapter will show, this conditionality can be manipulated to institutionalise power asymmetries. Hospitality is a framework for movement between: between different places, between having the basic necessities or not, and between orders of power. As such it facilitated global movement across Eurasia from Late Antiquity, and played an important role in the expansion and transformation of global interactions that took place from the sixteenth century with the opening of the transatlantic, and later transpacific, worlds. Performances of hospitality formed part of early encounter narratives, from Columbus's meeting with the Taino Americas to Captain Cook's encounter with the Polynesians in the Pacific. These stories of hospitality oiling the cogs of pre-modern connectivity are haunted by the parallel stories of betrayal and the making of the colonial world, the lingering indigestion of this convivial sociality.

In the Western tradition the concept of hospitality (hospitium) is derived from hospes (host, guest or stranger), which comes from the Latin root hostis (stranger or enemy). Within the exchange of hospitality mastery and communication clash, and it is not always clear which party will benefit and which will be wounded. The act of hospitality seemingly generously provides for the stranger, but that stranger may be both guest and enemy. The act of hospitality may be ethical, but it is also political. Practices of hospitality facilitate the construction of power asymmetries not only through the negotiation of the stranger as both guest and enemy, but through the manipulation of the ontological limitations of the stranger, the question of who ‘the stranger' can be.

Hospitality, welcoming and providing for the stranger, is part of the deep history of international relations, and it also helps explain why so many international relations are asymmetrical. Hospitality is a not only a framework for movement between places and needs but between power formations. Like the discourse of protection recently studied by Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, hospitality ‘represented a basic currency of interpolity relations', whose ‘legal status is difficult to pin down'.^{^[567]} Derrida explained that the ‘collusion between the violence of power or the force of law (Gewalt) on the one side, and hospitality on the other, seems to depend, in an absolutely radical way, on hospitality being inscribed in the form of a right',^{^[568]} yet the power of hospitality is derived from its multidimensionality, its ability to bridge the gaps between cultural practices and intersecting rights of varying legal status. This fluidity is open to manipulation. As Derrida observed, the conditionality of hospitality means that the guest is always hostage, but the host can also become hostage, such that the laws of hospitality ‘make everyone into everyone else's hostage'.^{^[569]} Both guests and hosts, then, can be hostages; but hospitality as a power praxis goes beyond this.

Hospitality provides a starting point for the transformation of the coordinates of ‘host' and ‘guest', as well as between guest and enemy. When European colonialists travelled to distant shores they arrived as guests operating within the normative framework of hospitality, but they transformed the landscape of hospitality such that they became hosts. As colonialism developed, the institutions of hospitality (from hospitals to monasteries) were transplanted to the Americas where the Amerindians were received as guests (strangers/enemies) much like the poor in Europe.

The early conquistadores conceptualised themselves as guests in the New World, but as colonialism unfolded the poles of the host-guest relationship switched and Amerindians became, not rich hosts inviting the conquistadores to the banquet table of the Americas, but a people struck by poverty and in need of hospitality. Bartolome de Las Casas and other so-called defenders of the Indians often referred to the Amerindians as ‘poor and wretched', making the comparison between the Amerindians and the poor in Europe. Referring to the Amerindians as ‘personas miserables' was not simply a rhetorical description of unfortunate people but had been developed in Canon Law during the Middle Ages, as personae miserabilis, to denote a juridical condition whereby the poor could legally claim certain protection, a protection which was in place of self-governance. This construction of the Amerindians as poor and needing care began to take shape legally. In 1539 Francisco de Vitoria suggested that the Amerindians might need special legal protection as they were unable to govern themselves, and Las Casas asserted that they should have the legal protections of the miserables in Europe.^{^[570]} The definitive contribution to this construction of the Amerindians as poor came in the writings of Juan de Solorzano Pereira (1575-1655), who drew upon the legal category of the poor in Europe, personae miserabilis, to re-situate the Amerindians in colonial society. As Susan Scafidi explains:

reasoning from time-honoured principles of medieval law, [Solorzano] discovered that legal analogy would allow him to identify Native Americans with the poor, wretched members of European society.

Analogy ossified into a set of rules and expectations, and Indians - elite and otherwise - became wards to be educated and protected by guardians under the special protection of the Spanish legal system.^{^[571]}

Legal analogy constructed Amerindians as a vulnerable, incapable, and powerless people and placed them under the protection of the church and crown. This ‘protection' and ‘care' was increasingly channelled through the physical institutional sites of hospitality that had been developed to care for/govern the poor in Europe. The institutional sites of hospitality became deposits for Amerindian subjects and played a role in shaping the colonial society of the Spanish Empire.^{^[572]}

The sixteenth century was a threshold in the construction of inequality, both within Europe and globally. New visions of social order combined with hardening attitudes towards the poor led to the transformation of cultures and institutions of hospitality. Around the world Europeans began to build empires, establishing and institutionalising asymmetrical and appropriative relations with the peoples whom they encountered. Within Europe the poor were no longer honoured guests, but were increasingly seen as enemies. Policies and programmes of assistance were increasingly embedded in paternalistic discourses, social assistance was increasingly institutionalised, and these sites of social assistance increasingly became sites of control. In the Americas, the impact of the colonial invasion intensified across the sixteenth century and shook the socioeconomic fabric of Amerindian society, increasing multiple forms of poverty as well as disrupting indigenous networks of social assistance. Amerindians were reconstructed as poor through socio-economic degradation and legal analogy. Those constructed as poor, in the Old World or the New, were to become strangers everywhere while the rich would be strangers nowhere.

Theories of hospitality have been integral to conceptions of ideal societies in the Western tradition.^{^[573]} The Ancient Greeks developed the concept and customs of hospitality, believing that providing for and not fearing the stranger constituted a civilised society and distinguished them from the barbarians.^{^[574]} This idea was continued by the Romans, and references to hospitality can be found across classical texts.

Within the classical framework hospitality was not just a custom but also part of the Western legal tradition and the right to hospitality, ius hospitii, became part of Roman law. During the Renaissance, humanists revived the idea of hospitality. This was not to be the universalist basis of an equal society, however, but rather a strategy of inequality. As San jay Subrahmanyam observes, we need to ‘examine how notions of universalism and humanism emerge in various vocabularies, and yet how these terms do not in fact unite the early modern world, but instead lead to new or intensified forms of hierarchy, domination and separation'.^{^[575]} Hospitality proved a malleable material for the legitimation of power asymmetries. Not only did it mediate movements between enemies and guests, and guests and hosts, but as a cultural practice that was both legally and morally normative it both hardened into the physical spaces of institutions and provided the fluid medium for the movement between different worlds.

The history of hospitality in the sixteenth century is the history of the opening of worlds for some, and the closing of worlds for others. This chapter begins with an exploration of how the normative cultural practice of hospitality provided a framework for the Spanish encounter with the Tlaxcalans. It then surveys the divergence of the application of hospitality as a body of legal and moral norms. It highlights how the Spanish tried to justify their appropriation of resources in the New World by drawing upon hospitality as a legal resource, at the same time that elites restricted systems of hospitality for the poor in the Old World and eroded the legal and moral foundations of the poor as recipients of hospitality. It concludes with a reflection of how the Spanish transformed the coordinates of hospitality in the New World to become hosts extending institutions of hospitality to Amerindian guests, transposing the infrastructure of hospitality as a system of control as it had been developed in sixteenth-century Europe. The sixteenth century witnessed an inhospitable divergence, as Europeans extended claims to hospitality in the New World which were simultaneously being denied to those in need in the Old. It simultaneously experienced a convergence of power in the institutional sites of hospitality, namely hospitals, which were designed to assist and control those guests who were also enemies.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

INTRODUCTION

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