‘ <i>Contra ius gentium</i> ’: The Mendoza-Drake Dispute and English Legal Arguments for Empire, 1580–1585
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
To what extent did Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe influence empire formation in the late sixteenth century? In analyzing diplomatic letters of correspondence from the State Papers, this investigation reveals that Drake’s piratical activities, claims of English sovereignty, and the ensuing diplomatic controversy with the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, forced the English Crown to use legal arguments rooted in the ius gentium (law of nations) and natural law to justify expansion into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. During the dispute, both Mendoza and the English Crown variously invoked natural law and the law of nations to argue for justice and friendship. In testing these legal arguments, the Crown demonstrated that it had the capacity to counter Spanish claims for empire, which subsequently influenced imperial propagandists like Richard Hakluyt to promote English expansionism in natural law and ius gentium terms. In turn, the English Crown’s newfound confidence from the dispute manifested in its turn to reason of state and self-preservationist thinking in its international relations in the early 1580s, shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). The dispute thus facilitated an ideology for empire rooted in natural law and the law of nations in the sixteenth century.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it