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The Working Papers of Hugo Grotius is the first full-length study of the handwritten documents initially used by the author of Mare Liberum (1609) and De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625) in his day-to-day activities as a scholar, lawyer, and politician, but subsequently incorporated into his own or other archives. Martine van Ittersum reconstructs a process of transmission, dispersal, and loss that started during Grotius'lifetime and ended with the papers'auction in 1864. This is also a study of archival afterlives. Our understanding of Grotius'life and work is shaped by the conscious decisions of previous generations to retain or discard documents, frequently for the sake of individual lives and careers, family honour and/or larger political and religious ends.

The essays collected for this volume represent the best scholarly literature on Hugo Grotius available in the English language. In the English speaking world Grotius is not as well known as his fellow 17th century political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, but in legal theory Grotius is at least as important. Even on central political concepts such as liberty and property, Grotius has important views that should be explored by anyone working in legal and political philosophy. And Grotius‘s work, especially De Jure Belli ac Pacis, is much more important in international law and the laws of war than anyone else‘s work in the 17th or 18th centuries. This volume is therefore useful not only to Grotius scholars, but also to anyone interested in historical and modern debates on key issues in political and legal philosophy more broadly, and international law in particular.

One of the great paradoxes of post-medieval Europe, is why instead of bringing peace to a disorganised and violent world, modernity instead produced a seemingly endless string of conflicts and social upheavals. Why was it that the foundation and institutionalisation of secured peace and the rule of law seemed to go hand-in-hand with the proliferation of war and the violation of individual and collective rights? In order to try to better understand such profound questions, this volume explores the history and theories of political thought of international relations in the seventeenth century, a period in which many of the defining features and boundaries of modern Europe where fixed and codified. With the discovery of the New World, and the fundamental impact of the Reformation, the complexity of international relations increased considerably. Reactions to these upheavals resulted in a range of responses intended to address the contradictions and conflicts of the anarchical society of states. Alongside the emergence of'modern'international law, the equation of international relations with the state of nature, and the development of the'balance of power', diplomatic procedures and commercial customs arose which shaped the emerging (and current) international system of states. Employing a multidisciplinary approach to address these issues, this volume brings together political scientists, philosophers, historians of political thought, jurists and scholars of international relations. What emerges is a certain tension between the different strands of research which allows for a fruitful new synthesis. In this respect the assembled essays in this volume offer a sophisticated and fresh account of the interactions of law, conflict and the nation state in an early-modern European context.

This monograph is a study of the interaction of politics and political theory in The Netherlands and Asia in the early seventeenth century. Its focal point is the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who developed his rights and contract theories for the benefit of the United Dutch East India Company or VOC. The monograph reconstructs the immediate historical context of his political thought, as conceptualized in his early manuscript De Jure Praedae/On the Law of Prize and Booty and Mare Liberum/The Free Sea (1609). It argues that Grotius'justification of Dutch interloping in the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal made possible the VOC's rise to power in the Malay Archipelago, which resulted in the slow, but steady, loss of self-determination on the part of the inhabitants of the Spice Islands.

The Rights of War and Peace is the first fully historical account of the formative period of modern theories of international law. It sets the scene with an extensive history of the theory of international relations from antiquity down to the seventeenth century. Professor Tuck then examines the arguments over the moral basis for war and international aggression, and links the debates to the writings of the great political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. This is not only an account of international law: as Professor Tuck shows, ideas about inter-state relations were central to the formation of modern liberal political theory, for the best example of the kind of agent which liberalism presupposes was provided by the modern state. As a result, the book illuminates the presuppositions behind much current political theory, and puts into a new perspective the connection between liberalism and imperialism.