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This paper examines the relationship between understandings of Indigenous government and the development of early-modern European, and especially British, political thought. It will be argued that a range of British political thinkers represented Indigenous peoples as being in want of effective government and regular conduct due to the absence of sufficiently developed property relations among them. In particular, British political thinkers framed the ‘deficiencies’ of Indigenous people by ideas of civilization in which key assumptions connected ‘property’, ‘government’, and ‘society’ as the attainments of civilized polities and societies. Accordingly, Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere were perceived to live in associations (rather than ‘societies’) bound by custom and tradition (rather than ‘government’). The paper will thus identify conceptual connections made between property, polity, and sovereignty in European and British political thought, and argue that such understandings provide a useful resource for understanding colonial attitudes to Indigenous people in Australia down to the present day.

This article argues that the colonization of Australia was justified by denying that Indigenous peoples possessed recognizable societies, law, property rights or sovereignty. This denial, in turn, rests upon the supposition that Indigenous Australians were living in a 'savage', pre-civilized state: the state of nature of liberal theory. Such concepts, deeply embedded in western political thought, informed the view that Australia was a terra nullius or unowned land. Consequently, the contrast between 'savagery' and its counterpart, 'civilization' formed a critical element of colonial arguments that Australia could be colonized without either a war of 'conquest', or making a treaty. We argue here that more than 14 years after the rejection of terra nullius in Australian law, its legacy and the assumptions that underpinned it persist in the concepts more recent debates deploy as well as in the concept of terra nullius that some of these debates rehabilitate.

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Liberal IR theory accepts as axiomatic that the domestic "nature" of the state "is a key determinant" of its "behaviour" toward other states. 1 This assumption rests on the centrality within liberal politi cal thought of the view that peace is a quality achieved by civil soci eties within states, while the external world of relations between states remains an arena of, at least potential, conflict. 2 Within recent IR thought however, there has been a growing acknowledg ment of the need to question this boundary, evinced by growing interest in questions of identity that cut across the divide between the domestic and international realms. 3 Nevertheless, the bound ary between "inside" and "outside" of an exclusive community of citizens within and a potentially threatening world of hostile states without remains central to liberal thought. 4 What this division implies is that while liberal or civil societies within states practice a politics of universal principles, of peace, rights, and citizenship, relations outside the state are shaped by "contingency . . . bar barism . . . violence and war." 5 Liberal IR theory has responded to this apparent problem by arguing that liberal states are at least more peaceful than illiberal states and that global conflict can be reduced by the spread of liberalism worldwide.In contrast to liberals, realists are inclined to accept the persis tence of war as an enduring phenomenon of an international sys tem that imposes its requirements on the behavior of states. Lib eral IR theorists tend to respond that liberal states are "inherently peaceful," and engage in warfare only with illiberal and undemocratic states. 6 For a variety of liberal theorists, the implicit acceptance of this latter proposition can be detected in the consistent ascrip tion of violent motives to illiberal and nondemocratic states to