Opening Hugo’s Box - Part II
Welcome to part II 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 (Hugo de Groot).
(for part I click here)
Part II
Contract Colonialism - A Unique Dutch Contribution
The Dutch contribution to colonial law and power was the introduction of the contract as a means to justify the conquering of Indigenous lands. Where the Spanish and Portuguese were deeply engaged in discussions around the Christian conquistador missions in the Americas, the Dutch used de Groot’s version of the right to free trade and navigation as a means to justify conquest and Indigenous dispossession. I started calling this particular Dutch contribution to European colonialism “contract colonialism.” The Dutch were renown for devising contracts that would be impossible to terminate or get out of. Such contracts would often designate a particular area, or a particular crop as a permanent possession of the Dutch. Oftentimes, the terms of a Dutch contract were incommensurable with local understandings of land, ownership and trade. An example would be the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade in Southeast Asia.
For de Groot, the breach of contract acted as one of the primary causes of war. And for de Groot, war meant that the Dutch would be justified to take possession of Indigenous lands, livelihoods and peoples. Breaking contract with the Dutch, according de Groot, would make the Dutch the victim, or the injured party to a dispute even though the terms of contract were often incommensurable. The taking of Indigenous lives and livelihoods was thus not an act of violence, according to de Groot, but the necessary and innocent result of Dutch business practices passing as natural law. Within his framework it becomes legally impossible to hold the Dutch accountable for colonial and racial violence. Furthermore, he wrote, some people - non-Christians, women, the poor – were more naturally inclined to accept the position of the party least benefited by a contract, because it suited their rational capacity better.
If de Groot was indeed the father of contemporary international law, how can it be the case that most of his legal writings were deeply embedded in making Dutch imperialist aggression look like innocent, virtuous and just trade? And what was it about his work that made it seem as if spreading Dutch models of trade all over the world might help Indigenous peoples see the light of Christ? 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. If business could not be conducted per Dutch usual, it would be legit for the Dutch to use force and claim Indigenous lands as their own.
The Dutch were a pivot for the shift from Iberian imperialism to late 18th and 19th century British and French empires that dominate contemporary scholarship of imperial and colonial history. Besides the first stock exchange and the first multinational corporation, the Dutch developed and mastered the art of what I call “contract colonialism.” Grotius devised a legal structure wherein contract was sacred, and any breach of contract would justify both warfare and conquest. The Dutch developed contracts with Indigenous peoples based on Dutch notions of contract, property and time that enabled the Dutch to conquer Indigenous lands across and oceanic trade network the globe. Contemporary treaty and contract structures continue to disproportionately and negatively affect Indigenous communities today. For instance, neoliberal models of resource extraction from the Global South are deeply informed by Grotian notions of property acquisition, contract and extraction. These forms of domination and extraction would’ve been unimaginable without Grotian notions of contract.
Reading Grotius renders visible the cultural, political, economic, and legal logics upon which The Netherlands was built. It is not an accident that in the very first pages of his book Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, de Groot writes about how the very existence of the Dutch state is primarily dependent on Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia. Reading Grotius also reveals how much of contemporary forms of capitalist extraction are built upon Dutch models of business, finance and control. Grotius’ work not only justified Dutch privateering in Southeast Asia, but also devised the legal frameworks that would come to justify European imperialist legalities of Indigenous (dis)possession and racial slavery. Little did I know that an early Dutch humanist thinker had left such an impact on the ways in which modernity/coloniality continues to structure global relations. No wonder, the Dutch are only interested in the story of his escape in a book trunk! De Groot, not only a heroic thinker of The Netherlands, but an escape artist on top of that!
Unable to find any work addressing any of these themes satisfactorily, I started writing about Grotius’ work. In particular, I am trying to subject Grotius to Anticolonial and Postcolonial Critique; Feminist and Queer Scholarship; and Black and Indigenous Studies scholarship. The series of articles I am developing look not simply at the work of Grotius, but at the Grotian imaginary and its impact on the transformation of the ocean into a canvas for global capitalism, regimes of property, conquest, European imperialisms, and racial slavery. I am interested in how Grotius’ reconfiguration of the ocean for European imperialisms was foundational to the development of an international legal order that professes continental European reconciliation (back then the Peace of Westphalia, today the European Union) and state formation alongside ongoing outer-European extradition of (maritime) warfare, capitalist extraction, and colonization (back then European colonialisms and slavery, today mining, oil drilling and the export of industrialized production to the Global South) foundational to European notions of self, property and statehood till this day.
to be continued…