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Studies on the nature of human rights have reached an impasse largely due to a general resistance to engage with the continuity of ideas and theories drawn from religion, morality and ethics in the history of international law. With the impasse of human rights, the article refers to an epistemological deadlock about what human rights are. Studying the concept of natural rights, it is argued, offers a means of breaking this impasse and, ultimately, easing the current tension between historicism and essentialism in human rights theory. The article concludes that natural rights were means to decide the moral questions posed by the violent redistribution of (material) goods taken to be common by the theoreticians of the expanding European empires. Probing in this manner into natural rights’ early uses and embedded theories gives us new tools and fresh approaches to be employed in relation to the challenges posed by contemporary global politics.