Joe Borsato is a final year PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University, where he researches the histories of Indigenous peoples, the period of European exploration, and global history. His broad interests include the histories of Indigenous power, Indigenous law, Indigenous relations with New France, the moral philosophy of European colonization, the political ecology of empire, and the political thought of people who opposed empire from antiquity to the modern period.
Joe’s doctoral project takes an oceanic perspective by investigating Anglo-Indigenous relations in Wabanakik (Acadia), K’taqamkuk (Newfoundland), Wînipâkw (the Hudson Bay watershed), Tsenacommacah (Virginia), Güiri noko (Guiana), and the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century. Specifically, the project examines Wabanaki, Beothuk, Cree, Powhatan, Arawak, and Kalinago expressions of their power and rights against English colonization. Through an investigation of archival records in the British Library, the National Archives of the UK, the Lambeth Palace Library, the Bodleian Library, la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the National Library of Ireland, the project contextualizes the mutual foundations of Indigenous rights and international law. Given the Government of Canada’s recent implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2021, the historical relationship between Indigenous rights and international law is one of considerable pertinence.
His next project examines Indigenous rhetoric and oratory against European empires globally in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is also currently serving as a research assistant for Dr. Scott Berthelette on a project tracing Haudenosaunee voyagers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Mediterranean world.
Over the past four years he has received support from numerous international organizations and funds, including most recently as a SSHRC scholar (2020-2024), Robert L. Middlekauff Fellow at the Huntington Library (2023-2024), a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellow with the Renaissance Society of America (2024), and as a Sansom Ideas Foundation scholar (2023-2024). With previous work experience in First Nation communities, sustainability non-profits, and the heritage sector, Joe also serves as a Teaching Fellow at Queen's, teaching first-year survey courses in European & Mediterranean history from antiquity to the modern period and fourth-year seminar courses on Indigenous Peoples and European Empires in the early modern period. He is fortunate to work with Dr. Scott Berthelette and Dr. Jeffrey Collins.
"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively." - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Book Reviews
Winchcombe, Rachel. Encountering Early America. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. In Journal of British Studies 62:2 (2023).
Pluymers, Keith. No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. In Ethnohistory 70:2 (2023).
Stern, Philip. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2023. In Global Intellectual History (2024, see pre-print here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2024.2311792).
“‘Contra ius gentium’: The Mendoza-Drake Dispute and English Legal Arguments for Empire, 1580 – 1585," with Global Intellectual History.
This article investigates archival documents relating to a case study of an Anglo-Spanish dispute about the uses of the law of nations and natural law for settling questions over piracy and sovereignty in the Atlantic and Pacific during the early 1580s. The article is based on my Honours thesis which I previously completed at the University of Calgary. It is available in pre-print view here: https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.queensu.ca/doi/full/10.1080/23801883…;
“‘We should sowe and reape in peace’: Algonquian Foundations of Colonial Insecurity in the Correspondence of the Virginia Company.” The Journal of History 59:2 (2024): 208-237.
As part of a special issue on the history of genocide, this article explores a case study in the history of the concept of genocide. Specifically, it looks at the impact of Algonquian nations' agency on the Virginia Company's uses of natural law and the law of nations amidst the company's efforts to colonize in the Chesapeake region during the early seventeenth century. In analyzing archival records from company members, the article argues that Algonquian peoples induced a profound moral insecurity in the company due to ambiguities in natural law and the law of nations.
