Commentary on the law of prize and booty
By: Hugo Grotius ; edited and with an introduction by Martine Julia van Ittersum.
Contributors: van Ittersum, Martine Julia, 1968-
Series: Natural law and enlightenment classics
Publisher: Liberty Fund; Liberty Fund, Inc.
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Indianapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 632
ISBN-13: 9780865974746; 9780865974753
Subjects: Prize law.; Booty (International law); War, Maritime (International law)
Description: "Commissioned in October 1604 by the United Dutch East India Company, Hugo Grotius's Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty was intended to justify the Dutch capture in 1603 of a wealthy Portuguese merchantman, the Santa Catarina, in the Strait of Singapore. In a clever and intricate defense of international free trade, Grotius (1583-1645) introduced the notion of a man as a sovereign and free individual with a right to self-defense and, by extension, the right of a company of private merchants to establish a trade empire."--Jacket.

The history of Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty is complex. When Grotius's personal papers were auctioned in The Hague in 1864, scholars discovered that Mare Liberum was just one chapter in a manuscript of 163 folios, written in justification of the capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore in February 1603. Robert Fruin persuaded the scholar H.G. Hamaker to transcribe and publish it in 1868. Knud Haakonssen, the General Editor of the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series, states,?Grotius's work on the right of prize and booty is unusual. It has been argued in some of the most prominent recent scholarship that the work, while never published by Grotius himself, was the intellectual resource for much of his most important work. One chapter of the manuscript was used for his famous work on the free sea, Mare Liberum, and many of the most important features of his greatest work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Rights of War and Peace), are either derived from, or revised versions of, the earlier writing."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Major legal and political works of Hugo Grotius."
Originally published: Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1950. (The classics of international law ; no. 22) (Publications of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
Table of contents: title: V. 1. The principles of moral philosophy