Becoming a Brill Author. Publishing Ethics. Publishing Guides. General Open Access Information. For Authors. For Academic Societies. For Librarians. Research Funding. Open Access Pricing. Specialty Products.
Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists. Accessing Brill Products. Corporate Social Responsibility. Sales Contacts. Ordering from Brill. Editorial Contacts. Offices Worlwide. Course Adoption.
Contact Form. Grotius is the father of modern international law. The indivisibility of sovereignty was the sine qua non of early-modern conceptual innovation in law. Both statements are axiomatic in the mainstream literature of the last two centuries. Both are profoundly and interestingly wrong. Instead, states and such corporations, able and forced to cooperate, fell under dovetailing natural, international, and municipal systems of law. It is argued that although formulated around the new East India trade, the actual reality of legal pluralism was available to Grotius in the Dutch trade experience of the sixteenth century.
This article aims to trace and explain a misunderstanding about the historical significance of the legal writings of Hugo Grotius that follows on the otherwise correct observation that he is not the father of modern international law. We undertake this by signaling the importance of divided sovereignty in his understanding of global order.
Yet, in trying to explain the conceptual innovations in that text, it is important to also look at the European world Grotius was more familiar with than the one he only knew from hearsay, i.
