 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome if you are joining us from wherever in the world you might be. Thank you so much for coming to this first and inaugural Maritime Warfare and International Law Symposium hosted by the Defence Studies Department of King's College London and the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. We are very much hoping that this will become an annual event. So if you enjoy what goes on here, then we will hope to see you back next year. This particular conference is on the theme of intersection continuity and evolution from the early modern period to the 20th century. And the idea behind this conference was really to bring scholars who focus on maritime themes and international law themes and to get a sense of how the treatment of these themes has changed from the early modern period into the 20th century. And I think that we've put together quite quite an amazing program with it with some pretty stellar scholars from around the world. So I want to say first of all thank you to Professor Greg Kennedy, who is is my sort of co-chair in this conference and without whom it could not have happened. I also wanted to thank Danny McDavitt, who is essentially the person at DSD who makes all of this technology possible, and who's going to keep the conference running for us from a technological point of view. And I also then would just like to thank all of our speakers for agreeing to come and be part of this and for being so easy to manage and be in contact with over the course of the past year as we were organizing this. Before we move on to our first panel just a few housekeeping notes and just please make sure that your cameras are off while the speakers are speaking. Make sure you are muted while the speakers are speaking. When we switch to Q&A, I would actually request that you keep your cameras off just to preserve bandwidth. When we move to the Q&A, you know, I will I will call on people who want to present their questions orally, but if you would like to write your questions in the chat as well. I will keep track of it there and then sort of pull questions together of a general theme and present those to the speaker. If the panels end early, then the next panel will start at its appointed time. This is so that people who are dropping in and out of the conference due to other commitments or having an interest in a particular panel won't miss anything at all. And without any further ado, in that case, I'm going to hand over to Professor Lauren Benton and introduce her a little bit. So Professor Lauren Benton is the Martin M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. Her research focuses on the comparative legal history of European empires and the history of international law. Benton's books include Rage for Order, the British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800 to 1850, co-authored with Lisa Ford. Also, A Search for Sovereignty, Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400 to 1900, and Law and Colonial Cultures, Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 to 1900, which was awarded the James Willard Hearst Prize and the World History Association Bentley Book Prize in 2019. Benton received the Toynbee Foundation Prize for significant contributions to global history. And so, without any further delay, Lauren, please take it away. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and to speak to you from afar. So, I'm going to be talking today about seaborne raiding in early modern empires, European empires, and of course historians agree that it was foundational to the formation of early overseas empires. And we also know that maritime violence in extra European spaces was central to the history of international law, not least through Grotius's 1609 tract, Marie Librem. But there is more to know about the way Europeans in early empires legally structured maritime violence and more to ask about the parallels in the legalities of raiding in practice and juridical writings on war. And today I'm going to approach these questions in a somewhat unusual way. I investigate what role households played in constituting early European empires and in shaping their capacity and right to make war. I'll book with analysis of commentary on two European writers, Francisco Suarez and Hugo Grotius. And please note that I am not suggesting that Imperial agents were applying European legal templates. And I'm also not making a case. Alexander wits that extra European legal practices were directly informing European doctrines. Instead, I will use the text as a lens through which to examine a historical material with the object of bringing new elements into view, and I'll use the cases to highlight often overlooked aspects of European texts on maritime warfare, and both moves reveal that the proliferation of households was a crucial element in efforts in both theory and practice to justify private or limited conflicts and to situate them within the category of authorized public wars. I begin with Francisco Suarez writer who summarize more broadly held scholastic views for Suarez households did not have today what we would call foreign policy. They could not as imperfect communities make war, only a legitimate sovereign could go to war against a sovereign by taking up a just cause in response to an injury. But Suarez stated that there was nothing inherently wrong about private war, even quote one fought by two or a few individuals and quote. A choir that is the nature of war, at least war of a limited sort. Private violence could be made to be part of a public war if a small engagement was defined as symbolically standing in for a larger armed conflict, or if private war was used to obtain tactical public conflict through weakening an enemy or strengthening the resolve of one's own soldiers. Together these mechanisms covered a lot of sins, private actions could attain the character of parts of a legitimate war. Whenever participants conform to public resolutions made by quote the possessor of authority. But what was the political community and what conditions gave public authorities their legitimacy. One of the questions appears in another part of Suarez's writings where he noted that political communities originated with the coming together of households and again he was following scholastics in in this regard. And I'm going to go over them selves sites of politics and I won't have time today to discuss Anna Becker's recent and excellent book on households as sites of politics and how they're talked about as sites of politics and early modern political thought but I do want to mention it here as an influence. Orderly households produced social and political order and reinforce the legitimacy of public authorities. They converted their authority to go to war and made it possible to align private violence with public goals. There was also a more specific relation of households to the state and that both participated in distributing and managing the proceeds from war. So this logic writer Suarez affirm the legality of taking captives and just wars enslavement of war captives was therefore a penal action and this logic made households into sites of perpetual punishment of captives and enslavement into an act that drew on public authorization but was carried out as private violence to restrict the rights of some persons. So by creating private slaving private seizure of goods including of captives. All these forms of violence might be bundled under the category of public war in certain conditions. Households were symbolically powerful in this conversion because they made political communities potentially capable of legitimate war, because they exercise private violence on behalf of public authority, particularly in holding captives. So with their members engaged in private violence against others that might support officially sanctioned goals. Now I'll ask you to keep these points in mind while I turn to two case studies. So Imperial histories teach us that the Portuguese created a trading post empire in the Indian Ocean, and maritime raiding we know was an integral part of that enterprise the Portuguese routinely sees coastal shipping in the Indian Ocean from the very first time that they arrived. And the corollary to maritime violence was the collection of protection money from Asian shippers through the sale of safe conduct passes. Now central to the system was the creation of a network of fortresses. This, this project may seem to us logical and even natural, but it was actually controversial among Portuguese in the East, and wouldn't have developed without the energetic legacy of a series of governors, most importantly, Afonso the Albuquerque who was governor from 1510 to 1518. The fortresses fulfilled a range of practical and symbolic purposes under the Treaty of Tordesillas the Portuguese were still required to show proofs of discovery and possession, and fortified outposts served this purpose, or aided it fortified garrisons were essential to financing empire in the East because they were the places where officials could receive prizes and take the Royal fifth. They made violence against passing ships possible and place soldiers and strategic positions for future crown actions. At the same time the men in these posts engaged in their own private or quasi private raiding and imperial officials were competing all the time with Portuguese captains for the service of these men. And remember that the empire, Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean was starved for manpower. Most men had little chance of ever sailing back to Portugal many were younger sons who were very focused on making their fortunes in the Indian Ocean. And some even turned renegade or threatened to turn renegade and renegade and join Muslim forces imperial officials like Albuquerque he understood the importance of solidifying their commander with these men and over fortified garrisons. They were patronage partly to do so, for example distributing captaincies of the forts these were valuable posts because captains took a share of prizes brought within the walls. They also pursued policies of household formation. Such policies tended to be treated by tend to be treated by historians as matters of internal administration of the empire and serve separate entirely from warm making capacity and rights. There's a different story in in Albuquerque's accounts. He described at great length in letters to the king his efforts to encourage marriages of Portuguese men to local women. The directive to encourage marriages had initially issued from the crown under Albuquerque's predecessor. He placed the policy and championed it, and he regarded it as essential to tying men to the garrisons and composing the outposts as pieces of Portuguese territory in which married men had the right to participate in town, excuse me town governance. Albuquerque offered soldiers and former soldiers direct payments if they married and he also took men's marriage status into account in making lucrative appointments. In the courtification scheme Albuquerque's marriage policy met with active opposition from captains who were competing with him for labor and the loyalties of Portuguese soldiers. At Goa Albuquerque reported to the king quote a rebellious council of men had sent out to wreck the whole enterprise unquote of marriages while Albuquerque was in Malacca. Albuquerque declared to the king that opposition to the marriage policy was quote the worst vexation that I have at present in India the worst vexation, and his vexation jumps off the pages in his letters to the king and occupies an place in those letters. Albuquerque complained at length about a Dominican friar who was inserting himself into marriage matters and undermining Albuquerque's exclusive authority over the assignment to women. He railed against a particular marriage match that he had not authorized and actually intervened in to seize the woman to have her married to another man. In these and other ways Albuquerque asserted his authority over husband's rights and over the dispensation of women. One has to note that the Portuguese were inserting themselves in a region where the taking of war captives mainly women was very common, and it was also a well established form of payment of booty to Portuguese mariners. On one raid off the East African coast Albuquerque reported that quote them captain major had given leave for every man to take as many captives as he liked. The value of captives as booty dependent on their having someplace to go, regularizing marriage and households not only stabilized garrisons under Portuguese rule it also turned them into repository for booty of all kinds including and especially If these preoccupations have been marginalized and accounts of Portuguese depredations in the Indian Ocean, it's partly because of the prevalent view that the Portuguese regarded themselves as fully authorized as Christians to attack Muslims anywhere. The focus on this blanket authorization for war has discouraged historians from interpreting the actions of Portuguese officials to establish their local right or capacity to make war. Yet as we've seen Imperial officials were acutely aware of and focused on the intricate connections among fortification household formation, the Constitution of garrisons as political communities, and their own capacity and authority to make war and to make peace with the proceeds of war. So I'm now going to move far away and later to the 17th century Caribbean. Early English colonizing to a large extent centered on the goal of creating bases from which raiders could reach Spanish sea lanes. Yet it was impossible to create viable footholds in the Atlantic from which to mount raids without both fortification and planting. Portuguese, but in slightly different ways the English did not seem to need to search for arguments for legitimate war. Before leaving England in 1654 at the head of a very large force to take Hispaniola from the Spanish or to try to general Robert Venables inquired about the legal basis for the expeditions and this is what he was told, quote that either with the Spaniards in the West Indies or not. If peace the Spaniards had violated it and to seek reparation was just if we had no peace then there was nothing acted against articles with Spain. So this formulation gave capacious legal cover for violence, but it did not exhaust officials interest in undertaking measures to reinforce the legality of private raiding. After failing spectacularly in Hispaniola Venables took possession of Jamaica and he found himself without the means to sustain a large and hungry army. A turn into planting seemed one answer a Council war was called in Jamaica and issued an order that the soldiers be distributed to plantations by lot. But the soldiers had few tools or knowledge with which to plant. After six months only half the original army of thousands remained alive. When the beast arrived in 1660 he described Jamaica's residents as an army, but without pay in London the committee of the Council of Foreign plantations took a similar view, the committee deliberated about how to make the perfect conversion of the army into a colony, and decided it was beyond their capacity they settled on the one thing that they could agree on and that was sending money to improve the fort. The conversion alone could not turn Jamaica from garrison to colony. Venables successor Edward doily grasp that rating offered more immediate gains than planting and was a faster way out of desperation for former officers and soldiers. Maybe had never stopped targeting Spanish ships and ports and private men of war gradually began to share in the rating in 1662 and 1663 a mixture of Navy and private ships participated in raids and in 1664 the first major raid took place. And that was entirely the work of private men of war it was a small fleet of 120 men that sees Santa Marta on the Spanish mainland. And governors facilitated the trend toward private rating by issuing commissions directly to privateers. And in 1662, Governor General Windsor took the unusual measure of declaring what he called a war with the Spaniards on this ground. Windsor boldly asserted that he held the power in himself to make either war or peace as he put it by, and this was an extraordinary assertion, one with a very pragmatic goal of allowing the governor to continue to issue commissions despite London's wish to make and keeps peace with Spain. The usual narratives of English piracy in the Caribbean, they tend to leave out the story of the army's crisis and the rise of rating as a response to the crisis. The standard accounts center on as I'm sure you know, sometimes they didn't begin with accounts of the periods Richard, Richard riches prize. In 1771 capture port de bello by Henry Morgan. It also emphasize they also emphasize the actions of footloose men, many originally based on tortuga, who collected import royal and took up piracy. So this storyline assumes that the unofficial war and sponsored reading prior to that belong to a settled condition of no peace beyond the line. It is said that before 1670 Governors went out of their way to justify rating including in two cases by declaring a regional war against Spain. Governors knew that as in Portuguese Goa households in Jamaica were the main repository for imported and captive labor. They also pursued a litany of strategies to encourage household formation from distributing and seeking servants from Scotland to encouraging the resettlement of families from other colonies to the purchase of African slaves for planter households. It is not an exaggeration to say that the legal encasement of slave labor on plantations developed directly out of and in tandem with measures taken to situate servants and captives from Spanish raiding in planter households. While we see that addressing the urgent problem of transforming the garrison into a colony pivoted around defining public authority over both households and private violence. Governors General acted independently of London and making local war, not just because they were pursuing their own private interests but also because it was impossible to rule the fractious former garrison, without asserting control over rating and its including captives and over households. Like Portuguese officials in the Indian Ocean Jamaican officials constructed their authority in relation to their capacity then to oversee raids and to distribute the proceeds to households. So do these histories show us new ways of reading European legal approaches to maritime violence. I think they do point to some interesting strands of thought. So the usual view of Hugo Grosius is that he developed a highly original position on the rights of private parties as well as public entities to make war. In the in Marie Libre, Grosius famously argued that anyone could lawfully punish violators of natural law, and Grosius also sought to extend and supplement this view in various ways. He argued as Annabelle Brett discusses in a recent article on Grosius and spaces of war, that the rights of private actors to defend and punish violators of natural law were activated in places where no civil authority was present. As Grosius put it such sites encompassed places quote on the seas in a wilderness in desert islands and any other places where there is no civil government included in this category were places inhabited by those, as he said who have not yet come together into a nation, such as those collections of families not yet cohere in the formation of political communities. Elsewhere to Grosius specified that a magistrate standing in for the sovereign might make war lawfully against mirror private persons. One of his most intriguing passages related to my theme today Grosius reflected on the necessity of controlled territory in the exercise of solemn war that is a declared war in which one side had a just cause for Grosius only in a solemn war that would be lawfully acquired by bringing things or people within the borders of a clearly controlled space. The corollary of this position of course is that the creation of such controlled pieces of territory could work to convert conflicts into solemn war. Fortifications might mark a controlled territory very effectively so might the presence of an army, which itself, according to Grosius could stand in for the political community. To emphasize the way claims about the adherence of participants to public goals, legitimated the violence of what he called limited wars. Grosius was pointing to the place where armies were masked or the creation of as, or the creation of a fortified place, as signifying that the capacity to convert booty into the legitimate spoils of war fortified places that doubled as political communities could give them private actions the color of public war. What broader points can we take from highlighting these themes and also by placing them alongside histories of maritime rating. Recently, in conclusion, Martin, Marty Koskini and he has argued that usual accounts of the history of international law have failed to appreciate a key contribution of the scholastics, what he calls the development of a vocabulary of rights. Private rights he tells us lay at the center of empire they rested on the universal nature of rights to property as well as on the centrality of just war to empire. What had to be defended in a just war that is was not just the political community but also widely distributed rights to property and attendant rights to travel and trade. Now this insight helps us to make sense of the lengths to which Suarez and Grosius went to bring together private and public authority, and it is also consistent with the history of practices and early empire that I've described. But a key missing element is the importance in usual accounts is the importance of households in legitimation of violence. They made a bridge between private or limited war and legitimate public war. In empires creating and collecting households relieved any doubt that garrisons were political communities households also completed the punishment of enemies by exercising dominium over goods and captives. As repositories for subject citizens household households and garrison colonies gathered crown subjects whose private raids rolled up to public authorities. These household functions meant that the private empire of rights was not free floating an individual, like empire itself it was spatially uneven and gnarled a raid in a series of armed enclaves. So just to briefly summarize the transformation of mere collections of forts into elements of empires required three conditions. One was the proliferation of households to hold course labor and potential raiders. Another was the affirmation of the authority of imperial or colonial officials achieved in part through their their simultaneous establishment of the authority to make war and the authority to govern households. Third officials had to anchor their authority to the legitimacy of distant sovereigns. As we saw in Portuguese go and Jamaica they did so partly by championing their role in the formation and regulation of households. These legalities of households and raiding turned private violence into public war and converted armed archipelagos into empires. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you so much for that. Professor Benton that was absolutely fascinating. So we're going to open this up to questions now. And unless someone has a burning question on, I will actually kick off with a question of my own, but I'm happy to give the floor to you guys first. All right, brilliant. And I guess I will jump in. I had a question that actually came up from the start of your talk when you were talking about women as war captives with the sort of end game of becoming wives. Did the women who were taken as captive and eventually became these wives, did they have any legal recourse either local or imperial to contest this state of captivity at all? I think the quick answer to that is not that we know of. And I have to say that part of the difficulty of bringing this dimension of raiding into view is the dearth of records that we have about what happens to female captives. We can see in the Caribbean how many of them were taken in raids, but we don't know very much about what happens to them, if anything at all. And the same thing is true in the Indian Ocean where we know something about the governance of the households in Portuguese territories but not very much about the words of resistance. There are some hints in Portuguese records about the way the Portuguese actually regarded some of these very extended households as potential sites of fifth columns where people who were properly converted to Christianity or still had loyalties to other communities might steal from the Portuguese or abscond and there are some references to those but we just really don't have a very good record about what was going on. Having said that, one thing I would like to point out because it's really very interesting is that some of the, a lot of the recent work on slavery in the Atlantic points out or suggests that we should really think about slave rebellions in general in a slightly different way and think about them as part of the laws of war. That is to say that in a sense this idea that households were holding captives as a form of perpetual punishment. One of the things of that or the corollary of that is that captives were themselves in a state of war with their captors and so in say Vincent Brown's recent book on tacky's rebellion he uses that logic to talk about the rebellion as an act of war and suggest that captives regarded it that way. Thanks to you to questions about the maroon populations as well and the preys made with those populations and all that sort of stuff. No, that's fascinating. Thank you. So I'm going to read out a question from Professor Greg Kennedy who says, you mentioned the role of households in the redistribution of wealth. Can you speak to the method of redistribution blood relations, size of contribution to effort potential as possible rival or important partner, etc. Is there any chance he could come on and explain that question a little bit better. I'm sure that Greg would love to do that. Well, maybe while he, there he is, you go. Danny said, Danny said yes I can. The question is really about in the in the household method then of the redistribution. How are they assessing, you know what, what good redistribution is, is there a formula, what kind of methodology are they really using that is it by blood kinship. How do you expand the household through, you'd mentioned the book, of course, the possible marriage so the way in which the distribution works is to create possible alliances or, or even to limit what you might perceive to be potential rival household that you would undermine the redistribution to limit their amount of power that would grow. So I just kind of interested in this wealth redistribution as being. Is there a sense of it being part of a growth of a greater something, or is it very territorial and very micro to the household itself. Well, I don't think it is entirely micro to the household itself in the sense that, you know, one of the things that I was not able to talk about given how much time I have but is I think speaks partly to your question is that is that there's a lot of controversy about politics around who gets access to captives and of course, a lot of this is is functioning around status, and in the conversion of, you know, I like to keep the eye on this notion that these are garrisons and armies that are in being converted into colonies. And so one of the things that operates is that there's, there are status distinctions from within the military so that that continue to have power in the way. And so the booty and captives and land are distributed on, and you can see this, you can see this actually in both my examples been Jamaica. You know, initially, officers are being given more land and more access to captives than than rank and file people are of course there are a lot of status distinctions as you can imagine in the Portuguese Empire that are entering in and these are points of I wouldn't describe them as kind of fixed system they are improvising as they go and when they get kind of pushback from rank and file, who are unhappy about their lack of resources and access distribution changes. Is that helpful, I mean, I, they are insight into what's going on inside households is unfortunately I think really very limited, but I do want to point out this kind of, you know, I think somewhat missed connection between captive taking and in war and the English enslavement and slavery implantation slavery these things were operating very much in the same register. No I mean it is really helpful or in the sense that you know you, you have the concept yes of redistribution of gold and silver weapons even or the other kind of, but you know the power of slaves in terms of both economic status as a signal and symbology within the structure, I think are really quite, quite important in these, these frontier developing areas, because they represent so many of these different kind of elements and I'm just thinking about the kind of the codification, the, the understanding of this and how this would work and be, to my mind what you paint is very, very, very complicated administrative pictures social economic, political, you know all of the elements to it on a, on a daily basis almost. So it's very much flowing through a kind of continued politics one element that's also worth mentioning is then that partly responds to Anna's question as well, is that there's good evidence that servants, and, and possibly captives to we're very aware of the relative status of households in on Providence Island in, which is also in some ways even a better example than early Jamaica, these phenomena, the sponsors back in London say well you know if we give households in Providence Island association with with noble households and grand grandee households in England that will will will give them a better capacity to attract and hold labor, because individuals will see the advantages of aligning themselves with high status households. The extent to which that was actually true, we don't so much know but it was certainly something very much on people's minds. Lauren I've got a couple more questions from the audience. And so Fernando says, he has a question about grossius. He asks, is grossius building on the previous scholastics, I francisco the Victoria, etc. And what can we say about 20th century uses. So for example, James Brown Scots uses grossius when the US is picking up global momentum, namely is freedom, the recourse of the powerful, or not necessarily. So, these are great questions, grossius yes very much is echoing scholastics and the reason I put him together with Suarez is because I think it's important to understand that he also is operating on this well accepted scholastic view about political community formation. And as for 20th century applications what I'm actually most interested in is the justification of limited war and small war. And so this is part of a book that goes at that problem from multiple directions, and, and sees, you know, certainly some continuities of these different phenomena in the 20th century around justifications for, you know, limited war, which as we know, just reading the headlines of the past week continues to be a very important problem. I haven't thought probably enough about how this particular household phenomena layers into the 20th century, but I will do more about that I do think that the question of what makes a political community that has the legitimacy to go to war is still a burning question as we see. And that was not intended as a pun but as we see in Gaza. Yeah, absolutely thank you for that. And then we also have a question from Dr Alan James, who asks, did households in the formation of Portuguese Empire remain a long term strategy, or was this just an early feature of Portuguese occupation. I learned a long time ago this is the answer to every question as a historian is it's very complicated. So, it's very complicated. It continues to be I would say a partial strategy. This is the moment when we can see it in its sharpest form. But, you know, there, as the Portuguese move and their commerce expands there is a panoply of other interpolity arrangements that come into view, we know a lot more about their alliance building and so forth in the eastern Indian for example. Now, so their strategies get more layered and complex, but they still have the problem of building these enclaves and defining their relationship to Empire. And that definition of that relationship does continue to flow at least partly through the understanding of who's there, what Portuguese people are there, and are they families and of course the other thing that Iberianists will immediately recognize is that a key question is, is are these towns. Right, do they have the legal standing of towns do they have enough enough people who can inhabit towns had I had more time I would have shown you pictures these wonderful maps of the early fortresses in the Indian constitution, some of which label the rule of the casados the street of married men. Once you had enough married men you could have a town or the legal equivalent of one and it continued to be important. And I actually have another question as well that just occurred to me, was, was there any backlash from, or response doesn't have to be backlash from the Catholic Church to this type of marriage to to this idea of of taking a captive woman and converting her essentially into a wife, or did that somehow get, you know philosophically adapted into acceptable Catholicism. That's a super good question and one of the things in in in the Portuguese Empire is that as a kind of first principle the church was very much in favor of household formation as a form of Christianization right this was how you created a Christian community. Everyone in these extended households was supposed to convert. So they, they, this seemed consistent to a consistent element of crown and church policies, but you see already in Albuquerque's letters, the beginning of this conflict over who controls marriage you know marriage was the legal of the church. And so to have Albuquerque you know reaching in and you know pulling a woman away and having married and he's having this feud with one Dominican friar, and this is a kind of little window into a larger conflict over, over the church's dominion over marriage in general, but the overall kind of strategic policy of creating Christian communities on that they're aligned. I think that makes sense. Thank you for that. And then another question from the audience so from Lucia de Oliveira, sorry, Oliveira is, is the Portuguese logic implemented in Asia, similar to the one used in Brazil that later became the center of Portuguese strategy. There are similarities. Yes, and the thing that I would point to there is that this, this problem of constituting households to receive captives was actually a very central element of the ability to sustain violence on the frontier. Okay, so here I have focused on maritime violence, but the interior violence in Brazil, and not just in Brazil, also in Spanish America against, against Native Americans who are being made captive right through the colonial period despite the official ban on saving. This relies very directly on the legalities of household formation, right because these captives were taken and they were sold or sometimes even just assigned to households. And so there was a, there was a kind of legal construction of the household that was absolutely, had to, had to be supportive of this rating and these things went hand in hand, often they're viewed differently but you know you read on these raids, and you can see that this is a central preoccupation of that interior rating. Absolutely. There's a certain amount of consistency and adaptability in the empires going out to the different geographical areas isn't there. We've got another question and I am so sorry to this participant I do not know how to pronounce your name I'm going to give it a shot but I do apologize. I think it's doja I didn't turn is asking about the Portuguese Empire's validity of using the Treaty of Thursday CS as a causes belly in order to initiate war without papal intervention. So, this is a very good question and I just mentioned it in passing I do think it's very important that they they're not tying themselves and not these imperial agents in the east about whether they can raid legitimately. They're just doing it from the start and they are actively citing their, their, their role as Christians in war with at war with a kind of constant war with Muslims. So, I'm just answering less directly to the Treaty of Thursday CS, the reason I mentioned it here is because I do think it is important to the extent that that these imperial agents have the crown as their audience which in part of course they do for everything that they are, they are trying to support this kind of claims making and I think also the other reason why I think it's important to mention this is that, no matter how hard we try people continue to write about the Treaty of Thursday CS as if it's a division of the world into realms of sovereignty, and they forget that what the treaty says is that it gives the Portuguese on one side of the line, and the Spanish on the other rights to discovery and possession. And that means you still have to show that that you've discovered and that you possess and those the proofs of that are somewhat improvisational. So making fortifications was very important in that regard. Obviously, these things are linked. And I would say that, you know, it's because there's this confidence on the part of these, you know, Albuquerque is very confident that he doesn't have to worry about the right to attack Muslim shipping and and and yet here he is in Goa taking these measures and later in other places to attempt to kind of fortify this this local right to make war for all the reasons I described. Thank you so much for that. All right. Well, I think that we're going to sort of draw your panel to a close there. So I just want to say on behalf of all the participants since we can't clap virtually. Thank you so much. It was a really fascinating paper. Thank you for listening to it and we will return at 430 to hear Lucas has his on his paper so please stay with us and thank you to those who have participated so far and thank you again for Professor Benton for wonderful paper.