Huigh de Groot (1583-1645) — Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theorist of natural law — was the author of Mare Liberum (1609) and De Jure Praedae (composed c. 1604-1605, published posthumously), the foundational texts of the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, written on behalf of the VOC’s Heeren Zeventien to defend the Dutch East India trade against Portuguese and Spanish claims of exclusive jurisdiction. De Groot’s doctrines shaped the legal framework within which the Dutch-Atjeh commercial relationship unfolded, and his work is cited by Van der Woude in his Van der Woude (1948) as the legal-political background to the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609.
Mare Liberum and De Jure Praedae
De Groot composed De Jure Praedae (“On the Law of Prize”) 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 same capture, in a different theatre, that produced the formal Dutch-Djohor treaty of 3 April 1603. The chapter of De Jure Praedae that argued the freedom of the seas was published separately as Mare Liberum in 1609, at the height of the negotiations for the Twelve Years’ Truce. Van der Woude notes that the publication was timed to influence the colonial clause of the truce.
The argument of Mare Liberum — that the seas were free to all and that no power could claim exclusive jurisdiction over them — drew heavily on 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. De Groot’s conclusion, in Van der Woude’s quotation: “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
De Groot’s Mare Liberum and De Jure Praedae were written as the legal defence of the VOC’s East India trade against Spanish and Portuguese claims of exclusive jurisdiction. The Twelve Years’ Truce negotiations 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 doctrines, and his citation of Vitoria, gave the Dutch position its legal-theoretical foundation.
The later career
De Groot’s later career — his theological-political conflict with the orthodox Calvinist clergy, his imprisonment at Loevestein in 1619, his escape in a book-chest in 1621, and his subsequent career as a Swedish ambassador in Paris — falls outside Van der Woude’s period. His De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), the foundational text of modern international law, was the mature fruit of the natural-law theory he had developed in De Jure Praedae. The doctrines of Mare Liberum — freedom of the seas, freedom of trade — would shape international law for three centuries.
Significance
Huigh de Groot is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal Dutch jurist of the early VOC period and the principal theorist of the freedom of the seas that framed the Dutch-Atjeh commercial relationship. His Mare Liberum of 1609 — published at the height of the truce negotiations — gave the Dutch East India trade its legal-theoretical foundation, and his citation of the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria grounded the Dutch position in the broader Catholic natural-law tradition. The doctrines of Mare Liberum would shape international law for three centuries and provide the legal framework within which the Dutch-Atjeh commercial relationship — and the broader Dutch-Indies trade — would unfold. De Groot’s role in Van der Woude’s narrative is also that of the principal intellectual ally of the war party in the United Provinces: the doctrinal opponent of Johan van Oldenbarneveldt’s peace policy, and the legal theorist whose work the Coen programme of monopoly-by-force would — paradoxically, given the doctrine of free trade — invoke as its legal foundation.
See Also
- Mare Liberum
- Francisco de Vitoria
- Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
- Heeren Zeventien
- Twelve Years’ Truce (1609)
- Founding of the VOC (1602)
- Johan van Oldenbarneveldt
- Prince Maurits
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Jacob van Heemskerck
- 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).