Mare Liberum — “the Free Sea”, the doctrine of the freedom of the seas formulated by the Dutch jurist Huigh de Groot (Hugo Grotius) and published in Leiden in 1609 at the height of the negotiations for the Twelve Years’ Truce — was the legal-theoretical foundation of the Dutch East India trade against Portuguese and Spanish claims of exclusive jurisdiction over the Indian Ocean, and the framework within which the VOC’s commercial operations at Atjeh and elsewhere in the East Indies would be conducted. Mare Liberum is the principal legal-political doctrine of Van der Woude’s Van der Woude (1948).
The composition and publication
Mare Liberum was originally a chapter of De Groot’s longer manuscript De Jure Praedae (“On the Law of Prize”), composed around 1604-1605 on behalf of the Heeren Zeventien to defend the Dutch capture of the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina by Jacob van Heemskerck off Singapore in 1603. The chapter that argued the freedom of the seas was published separately as Mare Liberum in 1609 — at the height of the truce negotiations and timed to influence the colonial clause of the truce.
The argument
The argument of Mare Liberum was that the seas were free to all and that no power could claim exclusive jurisdiction over them. De Groot grounded the argument in the natural-law tradition of the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, the Salamanca professor who had argued that the Pope’s temporal power was limited to spiritual matters and that the Spaniards had no right to take possession of the Indies on their first arrival. Van der Woude, citing De Groot’s text, summarises the argument: “Zeer zeker is het een ontoelaatbaar misdrijf, dat iemand een groot gedeelte van de zee, ook al is hij daartoe in staat, aan het algemeen gebruik onttrekt”. And on the question of war: “dat de aanleiding tot een oorlog rechtvaardig is, wanneer de vrijheid om handel te drijven wordt verdedigd tegen wie die willen belemmeren”, from which it followed “dat de Hollanders een rechtmatige reden hebben gehad om de Portugeezen te beoorlogen”.
The truce negotiations
The truce negotiations of 1608-1609 turned on the colonial clause: whether the truce would apply to the East Indies, and whether the Dutch would be free to trade there. The Spanish position — that trade was free only in the king’s European dominions and in those places where his allies’ subjects had traffic by mutual consent — was rejected by the Dutch; the compromise finally accepted was ambiguous. Van der Woude notes that De Groot’s Mare Liberum, and his citation of Vitoria, gave the Dutch position its legal-theoretical foundation.
The paradox of monopoly
The doctrine of Mare Liberum — freedom of the seas, freedom of trade — was, paradoxically, the legal foundation of the VOC’s monopoly-by-force policy that would follow in 1609-1614. The Company’s monopoly claim was against other European nations (the English, the French, the Portuguese), not against the Asian rulers with whom the Dutch traded; the doctrine of Mare Liberum justified the Dutch commercial presence in the East Indies against the Portuguese claim of exclusive jurisdiction, and the Company’s monopoly claim was the institutional instrument by which the Dutch secured that presence. Coen’s Discours of 1 January 1614 — the working-out of the monopoly-by-force policy — would invoke the legal foundation that Mare Liberum had provided.
Significance
Mare Liberum is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal legal-political doctrine of the early VOC period and the legal-theoretical foundation of the Dutch East India trade against Portuguese and Spanish claims of exclusive jurisdiction. The doctrine’s grounding in the natural-law tradition of Vitoria — and its publication at the height of the truce negotiations of 1609 — gave the Dutch position its legal-theoretical foundation, and the doctrine would shape international law for three centuries. The paradox of Mare Liberum — the legal foundation of the VOC’s monopoly-by-force policy — was that the doctrine of free trade was invoked to justify the Dutch commercial presence that the Company’s monopoly claim would then secure. The doctrine’s role in the Dutch-Atjeh relationship was indirect: the sultan of Atjeh’s balancing policy among the European nations was itself a working-out of the principle of free trade that Mare Liberum articulated, and the sultan’s reception of the Dutch, English, French and Portuguese at his court in 1599-1602 was the principal Asian instance of the early-modern practice of commercial freedom that the doctrine of Mare Liberum defended.
See Also
- Huigh de Groot
- Francisco de Vitoria
- Twelve Years’ Truce (1609)
- Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
- Heeren Zeventien
- Founding of the VOC (1602)
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Discours of 1 January 1614
- Jacob van Heemskerck
- Johan van Oldenbarneveldt
- Prince Maurits
- Acheh
- 1609
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk II (pp. 56-57).
Verhandeling over het Recht op Buit (translation of De Jure Praedae), by Huigh de Groot, trans. Dr. O. Damsté (Leiden, 1934).
Mare Liberum sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio, by Hugo Grotius (Leiden: Elsevier, 1609).