ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between positivism and colonialism. It examines the way in which positivism dealt with the colonial confrontation. The chapter shows how positivism sought to account for the expansion of European Empires and for the dispossession of various peoples stemming therefrom. It seeks not only to outline an architecture of the legal framework, but also to question extant understandings of the relationship between colonialism and positivism and the significance of the nineteenth-century colonial encounter for the discipline as a whole. The sovereign is the foundation of positivist jurisprudence, and nineteenth-century positivist jurists essentially sought to reconstruct the entire system of international law based on their new version of sovereignty doctrine. A further central feature of positivism was the distinction it made between civilized and uncivilized states. The task of defining sovereignty was fundamental to positivist jurisprudence—and not merely because definition was such an integral part of positivist reasoning and methodology.
