Contract Colonialism

(a work in progress)

In four chapters, Contract Colonialism examines the emergence of Dutch empire and Dutch imperial thought through tracing the work Dutch East India Company lawyer, early modern humanist, and national historian Hugo Grotius and the aftermath of the Grotian imaginary. The book shows how Grotius’s racial capitalist notion of the human (in)formed legal and cultural imaginaries of Dutch empire that reached beyond its imperial bounds. Each chapter examines a different aspect of the suture between property and the human in Grotius. Chapter One examines the Dutch merchant as the figure through which Dutch colonialism is lived. Chapter Two foregrounds the role of colonial and racial difference in his thinking about voluntary and involuntary slavery. Chapter Three unsettles the idea of colonial purchase in the context of Indigenous dispossession. Chapter Four dives into Grotius’s construction of the ocean as perpetual res nullius.

A preliminary study for this book has appeared as “The Colonial Difference in Hugo Grotius: Rational Man, Slavery and Indigenous Dispossession” in Postcolonial Studies. The book will be completed in 2024.