Petra Gümplová gives a working paper on 'Rights of Conquest, Discovery and Occupation, and the Freedom of the Seas and the Genealogy of Natural Resource Injustice'

This paper traces the origin of three traditional international law principles – the right of conquest, the right of discovery and occupation, and the freedom of the seas. It showed that the right of conquest was created to enable territorial conquest of Indian kingdoms in Latin America and their inclusion in the territorial realm of the absolutist sovereignty of the Spanish crown for the purpose of domination and accumulation of natural resources for the exclusive benefit of the sovereign and for the maintenance of his or her imperial rule. The right of discovery and occupation was reinvented to regulate permanent settlement of colonizers in discovered territories with scarce resources and to facilitate acquisition of the property rights in land for them, either by forceful expropriation (by contract, enclosure, or agricultural settlement) or by violent elimination of native occupants from the land (by displacement or genocide). The freedom of the seas principle, also one of the founding international law principles which established non-sovereign ocean space as the avenue of commerce, then enabled colonization of distant markets by semi-private chartered companies by imposing monopolistic trading relations defined by unequal exchange and coercion.