 Colonial rule and settlement is another matter entirely. In his published writings in the 1790s, Kant is strongly critical of the European colonization of other lands already inhabited by other peoples. Settlement in these cases is allowed only by uncoerced informed contract. Even land that appears empty might be used by shepherds or hunters and cannot be appropriated without their consent (6:354). These positions represent a change in Kant’s thought, for he had previously indicated acceptance if not endorsement of the European colonial practices of his time and the racial hierarchy behind them. Kant himself produced a theory of human racial classifications and origins and thought that non-Europeans were inferior in various ways. Kant thought that the course of world progress involved the spread of European culture and law throughout the world to what he considered to be less advanced cultures and inferior races. By the mid-1790s, however, Kant appears to have given up beliefs about racial inferiority and no longer discusses it in his lectures. He publicly criticized European colonial practices as violations of the rights of indigenous peoples who are capable of governing themselves (8:358–60).