The Colonial Origins of Imperial Secularism: A Genealogy of Modern Violence -Part 2
If Part One traced how secular reason emerged as a legal solution to the moral crisis of colonial conquest, this second part of the article by Asokakumar V follows that logic into the present. It examines how a form of reasoning born to legitimise empire outlived colonial rule itself, reshaping historiography, state power, and global governance. By tracking how violence continues to be justified through the language of neutrality, law, and universal reason, this essay exposes imperial secularism not as a historical episode, but as an enduring structure of modern power.
The Afterlife of Imperial Secularism
The story does not end with the conquest of the Americas or the birth of international law. The secular reasoning forged to legitimise colonial expansion did not remain confined to its historical moment; it survived, travelled, and quietly reorganised the moral grammar of modern power. What began as a legal response to an imperial crisis as how to rule, extract, and dominate without invoking God gradually became the common sense of modern governance. To understand how contemporary violence is justified in the language of neutrality, security, and universal reason, we must now trace the afterlife of imperial secularism to know how a logic born in conquest continues to shape historiography, state power, and global order.
Those critiques, firmly situated in a divine-law rationality, were first voiced publicly in 1511 by the Dominican missionaries who had accompanied the Spaniards to the New World, specifically to Hispaniola (Hanke 1949, 142). Led by Antonio de Montesinos, the Dominican friars declared before the Spanish colonists that they would refuse absolution to slaveholders. Enumerating the injustices suffered by the Indigenous people at the hands of the colonists, the sermon charged that the Spaniards “you are all in mortal sin and live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny they practice against these innocent peoples…….Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day”(Las Casa1993, 67).
This ideological and legal crisis, intensified by the preaching and lobbying of the friars who vehemently advocated humanitarian concern for the Indians, unfolded irresistibly within both the Dominican theological circles and the royal judiciary. It demanded a new form of philosophical and legal rationalism. Francisco de Vitoria, the principal architect of the School of Salamanca, undertook this challenge by distinguishing the spiritual authority of the pope from the temporal order governed by natural law.
The two crucial debates of the period—first, over whether other European monarchs possessed a legitimate right to domination comparable to that claimed by Portugal and Spain, and second, over whether colonial rule itself was morally and politically justifiable—ultimately settled into a diplomatic reliance on Aristotelian natural law grounded in reason. Christian faith could not be used to normalise territorial seizure or the extreme brutality inflicted by European colonisers; such actions could not be reconciled with the spiritual equality affirmed by Christian doctrine. As a result, rulers and scholars turned to secularised reasoning as an unavoidable instrument for legitimising conquest. This shift was driven not by philosophical purity but by practical necessity: only a framework based on “universal” natural law could secure the uninterrupted flow of precious metals from the New World and stabilise the expanding imperial order.
Secular Panacea for All Moral Crisis
Since secular reasoning first emerged in the early colonial period as a defensive mechanism to exclude moral ethics from the realm of political economy, and as a diplomatic instrument for rationalizing violence, its legacy has continued into the present. Anghie writes, “The colonial encounter is central to the formulation of Vitoria’s jurisprudence whose significance extends to our own times ” (Anghie 2005, loc. 941). In this transition, a new political dualism emerged: the distinction between the religious and the secular. The same acts of domination continued, but the grammar of their justification changed—from theology to ‘reason,’ from papal decrees to natural-law universalism. As Talal Asad wrote, “secular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence since its object is always to regulate violence” (Asad 2003, loc. 197).
Secularism and Historiography
Why has mainstream Western historiography largely overlooked the encounter between European imperialism and the peoples of the New World—which catalysed the early emergence of secular reasoning in the sixteenth century—and instead focused so insistently on locating the origins of secular thought in the writings of Enlightenment political thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
Perhaps, first of all, mainstream narrators have been reluctant to reveal secularism’s role as a justificatory tool for the brutal violence inflicted upon the indigenous peoples—because such secularised violence is not merely a story of the past, but continues to resonate in the present. Asad writes,
“Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur‘an—or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafez al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an—nor did the secularist Saddam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not—so far as is publicly known—invoke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho. Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture” (Asad 2003, loc. 238).
Additionally, the secular violence that began with the Spanish expeditions has often been portrayed merely as an exceptional tragedy in the long history of Western colonial imperialism—what came to be known as the Black Legend.
The term“Black Legend” refers to a style of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda that depicted the Spanish Empire as uniquely cruel and exploitative during its colonial era. However, African former slaves themselves attested that northern European colonists were no less brutal than the Iberians (Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan 2007, 6). As Walter D. Mignolo states, ‘The conviction that a single, enduring system of knowledge—first framed theologically and later in secular philosophy and science—can explain everything is ultimately harmful to both humanity and the planet'(Mignolo 2011, xii).
Finally, the mainstream narrative reduces history to a black-and-white, eternal conflict between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular.’ Yet what counts as religion or secularism has always been defined by the convenience of the state. The result is the same on both sides: human empathy is gradually expelled from these supposedly opposing forces—allowing brutal conflicts to be justified without end. As Asad says, “What interests me particularly is the attempt to construct categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy. For representations of “the secular” and “the religious” in modern and modernizing states mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.” (Asad 2003, loc 323).
Whether through the direct or indirect supply of arms to conflicts in Gaza or Sudan; through invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam; through the imposition of tariff regimes on countries like India or Cuba; through the construction of global institutions such as the WTO and the WHO; or through the unscrupulous destruction of environments and Indigenous cultures, global political powers have repeatedly legitimised their interventions with a secularised rhetoric of universal reason—a modern descendant of the natural-law tradition that once justified empire.
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He was a teacher at the Marancheri Government Higher Secondary School in Malappuram district. He is involved in and writes on environmental and social issues. He was the editor of the magazine One Land One Life. He has published the books Green Revolution: The Fruit of the Fruit of Evil, White Rice that Gives Disease, Environmental Action at Home and School, Disease-Spawning Chemical Fertilizer, and the Political Psychology of Neo-Liberalism and Universal Worship in Malayalam and the book Disease-Spawning Chemical Fertilizer, published by Other India Press in English. He writes articles in periodicals that focus on cultural politics in the post-colonial context. He is active in Kerala Bio-Agricultural Committee and Good Food Movement-Ponnani.