Hugo Grotius Simulacrum

The Life

Hugo Grotius, or in Dutch Huig de Groot, was born in Delft in 1583 and was from his earliest years recognised as a prodigy. He entered the University of Leiden at eleven, took a doctorate at Orléans at fifteen, and by his early twenties was a practising lawyer at The Hague and a published poet and historian. His defence of Dutch East India Company prize-taking in the early 1600s led to the writing of *De Jure Praedae*, from which the short work *Mare Liberum* (1609) was extracted and published.

Political misfortune overtook him in 1618; he was imprisoned for life by the Calvinist regime that took power in the Netherlands, escaped in 1621 in a chest of books, and spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris and Sweden. His major work, *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* (*On the Law of War and Peace*), appeared in 1625. He died in 1645 in shipwreck off the Baltic coast.

The Thought

*Mare Liberum* argued that the sea could not be appropriated by any state, because its use was naturally common to all. The Dutch had a direct practical interest in this claim — they were challenging the Portuguese and Spanish monopolies on the oceanic trade routes — but Grotius gave the argument its classical form. The sea, unlike land, cannot be exhausted by use; navigation cannot be blocked by occupation; no one has yet succeeded in fencing it. Therefore the rule that governs it must be freedom of passage, conditioned only by rules that protect all users.

*De Jure Belli ac Pacis* was a larger achievement. It systematised what Grotius took to be the law of nations — rules of just war, peace-making, treaty obligation, diplomatic immunity, and the treatment of prisoners — on the footing of natural law rather than of religious revelation, and in a way that Catholic and Protestant powers could equally recognise. The work is usually treated as the founding document of modern international law.

The Legacy

The freedom of the seas that *Mare Liberum* defended became the governing principle of oceanic order from the mid-seventeenth century onward, contested by individual states at moments but never seriously displaced. John Selden's *Mare Clausum* (1635) was the major early rejoinder, and the Selden-versus-Grotius debate has recurred in every subsequent century, most recently over exclusive economic zones and contested seas. *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* founded the discipline that became international law, and its influence runs in an unbroken line through Pufendorf, Vattel, and the Hague Conferences to the United Nations Charter.