Opening Hugo’s Box - Part I
Welcome to part I of the series Opening Hugo’s Box, a series of blog posts with anticolonial musings on the work of United Dutch East India Company lawyer, humanist and Dutch state ideologue Hugo Grotius.
Part I
Finding Hugo de Groot – The Beginnings of Dutch White Innocence.
Hugo de Groot Plein; Eerste, Tweede and Derde Hugo de Groot Straat; Hugo de Groot School. Two generations of matriarchs – my grandmother and my mother – went to the Hugo de Groot School, the first as a teacher, the second as a pupil. I have several friends living around Hugo de Groot Square and the three streets leading to it that carry his name in the city of Amsterdam. There is a statue honoring Hugo de Groot in Delft, his place of birth. Who was Hugo de Groot?
I ask my grandmother and my mother if they can tell me more about Hugo de Groot. These two amazingly knowledgeable women - both teachers - tell me they know very little about him, except that he escaped in a book trunk after being imprisoned in Castle Loevensteijn in the wake of inter-Calvinist strife. When an episode airs on the Dutch public television series Historisch Bewijs (Historical Evidence), which investigates three book trunks claimed to be the book trunk Hugo de Groot escaped in, my grandmother rings me. I watch the episode and I am struck by two things. First, the amount of financial and other resources (forensics, tree scientists, police labs) spent on making this episode and its disappointing results – we still don’t know which one of the trunks is the real trunk. And, second, the one-hour episode makes no mention whatsoever about Hugo de Groot’s involvement with the United Dutch East India Company (VOC), his role in the Anglo-Dutch colonial conferences, his influence on the history and development of international and colonial law, or his manifesto mare liberum, also known as The Freedom of the Seas, written to justify Dutch privateering in Southeast Asia, which argued for the freedom of trade and navigation to provide just causes for invasion, conquest and colonization.
A quick search on the internet tells proves equally disappointing. Hugo de Groot was one of The Netherland’s most famous, illustrious thinkers. The father of International Law. One of the first philosophers to espouse a notion of human rights. An inspiration to the founding fathers of the United States. A great escape artist. What a legacy!
Now how did I end up with Hugo de Groot?
Preparing for the grant application for my research project, I learned about his short manifesto mare liberum, written by Hugo de Groot to defend the capture of a Portuguese ship in the Malacca Strait in the very beginning of the 17th century by Jacob van Heemskerck and his crew. The manifesto formed part of a preliminary study for his magnum opus On the Rights of War and Peace, called On the Affairs of the Indies (commonly known Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty). This magnum opus is a seminal text in the history of modern law.
In the manifesto, which was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company and published anonymously in 1609, de Groot sought to justify the capture of the ship and its booty, arguing that in absence of a judicial procedure –such as on the High Seas– a captain –such as van Heemskerck– could act as his own judge and decide to capture a ship of an enemy without that ship attacking him. De Groot called it reparations for Iberian wrongdoing against the Dutch in Europe. Furthermore, de Groot argued, van Heemskerck waged both a just private and public war on behalf of the United Dutch East India Company and the Dutch state against Portuguese and Spanish aggressors in non-European waters.
After its publication, the manifesto started leading a life of its own in Dutch, British and French colonial and metropolitan courtrooms, in law, in political philosophy. Colonial and state officials across Europe mobilized de Groot’s ideas about the freedom of trade and navigation to support their own imperialist ambitions. Mare Liberum provided a secularized version of the missionary conquistador ventures of the Portuguese and the Spanish, placing free trade at the center of its legal ideology.
Reading the manifesto, I became extremely intrigued by de Groot’s descriptions of the Dutch as naturally endowed sea people, whose cold, windswept skies blew Dutch ships in all directions to spread peace and Christianity through commerce. De Groot helped create a myth of the Dutch as innocent, free and virtuous merchant men who were solely interested in striking deals with Indigenous rulers to oust the Iberians from Southeast Asia and engage in trade. I also became fascinated with how he transformed this story about Dutch innocence, or the innocence of Dutch trade, into law. In other words, how he used descriptions of the Dutch as innocent, virtuous and just business men to ultimately set up a legal framework that would justify the taking of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, not as a Dutch strategy for imperialist expansion, but as the result of Indigenous peoples’ failures to respect contract.
Reading Hugo de Groot was like unfolding the deep seated foundations of growing up within dominant Dutch culture. It helped me make more historical sense of one of my favorite – and unfortunately almost singular – critiques of dominant Dutch culture and self-perception, Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016). White innocence is not just a phenomenon that emerged out of the colonial experience. Reading Grotius, I became aware of how the construction of Dutch innocence is foundational to the Dutch colonial experiment and its legal justifications. Dutch white innocence, I might even suggest, began at sea – its traces lost in the wake of the ship. I am slowly trying to uncover the relationship between Dutch maritime imagination and the formation of white innocence from the depths of the ocean.
After this first dive into what I now started calling the “Grotian imaginary,” I spent most of 2020 deeply immersed in the writings of de Groot, of Hugo Grotius, and writings about Grotius. I was shocked by how little I knew about the significance of Grotius for international and maritime law. At the same time, I was intrigued by how existing scholarship largely ignored notions of Dutchness and Dutch innocence undergirding much of his legal frameworks. Furthermore, I was surprised by the lack of attention scholars of Grotius paid to how these descriptions of Dutch innocence and supremacy were rooted in racialized descriptions of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. Unable to find any work addressing any of these issues satisfactorily, I am now writing a book on Hugo de Groot with the working title The Reluctant Imperialist and Other Dutch Colonial Myths. In particular, I am trying to subject Grotius to Anticolonial and Postcolonial Critique; Feminist and Queer Scholarship; and Black and Indigenous Studies scholarship; and, Critical Theory – the fields I’ve been trained.
Stay tuned for more about de Groot. In the next part, I will talk more about the relationship between the production of Dutch innocence, business and the law in Grotius. I will introduce what I have started calling “contract colonialism,” a particular Dutch contribution to the development of European colonialisms. Where the Spanish thrusted upon American shores with bibles, guns and crosses, de Groot seemed to suggest that the Dutch would simply have to show how business is done, as a novel and secularized version of the Iberian Christianizing mission.
to be continued…