The VOC, Corporate Sovereignty and the Republican Sub-Text of De iure praedae
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Abstract
This essay discusses some of the ways in which De iure praedae may be understood to constitute a republican text. It is my argument that the 'Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty' should be firmly located within the over-arching republican discourse of the juvenilia, although the text's republican content is not immediately apparent. On close examination, a republican sub-text is detectible through the author's treatment of the discursive object of the text, the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), a corporate body. By attempting to legitimate the VOC's natural right to wage just war, Grotius invests a private entity with a public mark of sovereignty. This investiture of a non-state actor with public international legal personality forces a careful reappraisal of two central characteristics of seventeenth-century republican thought: (i) the divisibility of sovereignty, and (ii) the fluid demarcation between the 'public' and the 'private' spheres. I conclude that the VOC may be accurately denoted a 'corporate sovereign', an entity whose legal personality is derived from the corporatist principles that underlined early republican and federalist theory.
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| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
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The VOC, Corporate Sovereignty and the Republican Sub-Text of De iure praedae
In: GrotianaSearch for other papers by Eric Wilson in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This essay discusses some of the ways in which De iure praedae may be understood to constitute a republican text. It is my argument that the 'Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty' should be firmly located within the over-arching republican discourse of the juvenilia, although the text's republican content is not immediately apparent. On close examination, a republican sub-text is detectible through the author's treatment of the discursive object of the text, the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), a corporate body. By attempting to legitimate the VOC's natural right to wage just war, Grotius invests a private entity with a public mark of sovereignty. This investiture of a non-state actor with public international legal personality forces a careful reappraisal of two central characteristics of seventeenth-century republican thought: (i) the divisibility of sovereignty, and (ii) the fluid demarcation between the 'public' and the 'private' spheres. I conclude that the VOC may be accurately denoted a 'corporate sovereign', an entity whose legal personality is derived from the corporatist principles that underlined early republican and federalist theory.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 127 | 50 | 10 |
| Full Text Views | 22 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 64 | 12 | 1 |