It had implications no less for coastal waters than it did for the high seas, for the West Indies as much as for the East Indies, and for intra-European disputes as well as for relations between the European powers and extra-European peoples. The book was taken by the English and the Scots as an assault on their fishing rights in the North Sea and by the Spanish as an attack on the foundations of their overseas empire. Although the arena of dispute was local, the implications of Mare Liberum’s arguments were global. The first was the relationship between the United Provinces and the Spanish monarchy, from which the Dutch had broken away in 1581 the second was the Dutch right to commercial penetration in Southeast Asia. By publishing Mare Liberum, he was displaying the literary, rhetorical, and philosophical talents that had won him his burgeoning fame and respect, and he was also intervening in two political debates of pivotal significance for his own country. Though self-taught as a lawyer, his reputation as an advocate and adviser was growing, along with his political influence. Grotius was only in his late twenties but already possessed a reputation as one of Europe’s most precocious and penetrating humanist scholars. The publication was anonymous, perhaps because (as Grotius later wrote) “it seemed to me to be safe, like a painter skulking behind his easel, to find out the judgment of others and to consider more carefully anything that might be published to the contrary” ( Defense, p. The book first appeared in Leiden as a pocket-sized quarto volume from the famous publishing house of Elzevier in the spring of 1609. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004).įew works of such brevity can have caused arguments of such global extent and striking longevity as Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum ( The Free Sea). Richard Hakluyt, with William Welwod’s Critiuqe and Grotius’s Reply, ed. Source: Introduction to Grotius's The Free Sea, trans.
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