The second chapter is devoted to the lure of India felt increasingly by the English merchant community, and the Company’s first, tentative attempts to gain a foothold in the great Mughal port of Surat. Frustrated by repeated failures to gain a favourable hearing from the emperor Jahangir, and the hostility of the Portuguese who were determined to resist any challenges to their trading privileges in the region, the EIC court petitioned James I to appoint Sir Thomas Roe as an ambassador. Although he was treated with respect, at the end of the three years of his embassy, Roe returned to London having gained few trading privileges. In the meantime, mounting hostilities between the EIC and Dutch VOC prompted protracted negotiations invoking the fledgling law of nations and culminating in the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1619.

The question of whether or not the sea can be owned or controlled has occupied the minds of many over the centuries. The discovery of America by Columbus made the questions of ownership of the sea and how regimes to govern the sea could be created and managed gain importance on a global scale. This chapter discusses the history of the law of the sea from the perspective of ‘Renaissance Europe’, focusing on the ‘battle of the books’ dominated by the publication of Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo de Groot (Grotius) and John Selden’s Mare clausum (1635). It shows that the concept of the free sea was perfectly compatible with the adjacent or territorial sea both in legal practice and in principle. The idea of the free sea, defended and made explicit by Grotius, was not new but originated in Roman law and its medieval interpretations. Rather than the free sea, mare clausum was the new contribution of early modern thinking on the law of the sea. The concept of mare clausum had been shaped by the division of the world’s oceans between Spain and Portugal based on the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) and the treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529).

This chapter explores the justification and legitimisation of war and ‘imperfect’ uses of force both in legal scholarship and diplomatic practice. The Grotian synthesis of ‘just’ and ‘formal’ war entered mainstream scholarship and reached its full explanatory force in the work of Vattel. The resilience of just war in the face of its impracticality among sovereign state in scholarship can, among other, be explained by the fact that the subtle interplay of two conceptions of law in fields of legal application - , gelled well with diplomatic practice. Whereas states applied the jus in bello and jus post bellum with regards to claims to the justice of the war, the just war doctrine remained a common discourse for the justification of resort to war and force and added an instrument to the toolbox of alliances diplomacy.

This chapter studies the elements of an interest-based natural property right. To acquire a prima facie right in a resource, the claimant must use it productively and claim exclusivity to its use in terms others will understand. But the prima facie right may be overridden by either of two provisos. The sufficiency proviso limits property rights when a proprietor’s use of a resource does not leave others sufficient access to the same type of resource for their own needs. The necessity proviso limits natural rights when someone who does not hold property in a resource needs access to it to repel some serious threat to life or property. This chapter illustrates legal doctrines for capturing animals and other articles of personal property, occupying unowned land, and appropriating water flow by use. This chapter contrasts productive use with Locke’s treatments of labor, waste, and spoliation, and it contrasts claim communication with Pufendorf and Grotius’s treatments of possession. This chapter also considers familiar criticisms of rights-based property theories, involving hypotheticals with radioactive tomato juice or ham sandwiches embedded in cement.

This chapter concentrates on the pivotal figure of Jean Barbeyrac, translator extraordinaire of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, and others. A French Huguenot refugee, Barbeyrac introduced the great Protestant natural law treatises to a French (and ultimately English) audience. But Barbeyrac was much more than a translator. He recast earlier natural law theories around individual conscience and made subjective right the foundation for society and politics. Where Grotius and Pufendorf had conceived of permission or “natural liberty” as the freedom to do whatever the law did not forbid (and thus, not really a right), Barbeyrac insisted a contrario that both natural and civil law tacitly determined – and thus legalized – what was permissible for subjects to do. For Barbeyrac, rights thus took precedence over duties, though only because every action had been made permissible by God. He extended this argument to property, which originated from a God-given natural right to first possession.

This chapter examines the history and development of collective self-defence. It is argued that – contrary to the common assertion that the concept was created in 1945 – its roots can be seen throughout history. The chapter maps that history, starting briefly with the alliances of ancient Greece and moving through to the writings of the seventeenth century, when recognisable characteristics of the modern concept truly began to emerge. It then focuses on the developments in the interwar years and during the Second World War, which saw an increase in the number of collective defence treaties. This period concluded with the emergence of a collective defence system in the Americas, which was extremely influential for the drafting of Article 51 of the UN Charter. The chapter concludes by analysing the drafting process, and the changes to collective self-defence that the adoption of the Charter brought about. It is argued that Article 51 ‘conjoined’ individual and collective self-defence in a way that had little basis in the previous historical development of collective defence arrangements under international law. This has had significant implications for how collective self-defence is understood today.

While the focus of the book is on the interstate use of force post-WWII, this chapter holds a rear mirror and offers a perspective of evolution of restraints that started long before states came into being. It recounts how human societies over the centuries became states free from widespread internal use of armed force and how great powers sought to avoid major armed conflicts through policies of balance of power and multilateral conferences. It describes how they developed common rules by concluding conventions and built institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to create a rule-based order and mechanisms and methods to prevent the interstate use of force.

This chapter comprehensively discusses theoretical approaches to international law and global governance, and provides a historical overview of the development of international law

This chapter examines the role of authority in public international law, based on the preceding discussion of authority and legitimacy in the context of exercises of power. Although there is a source of power, if not authority, at the domestic level in the form of government, this does not automatically transfer to the international level. This is primarily because the international system exists without a central authority. The question automatically arises of who ought to be able to make such rules, and whether the requirement for the exercise of autonomy is still as critical as it would be at the domestic level. The discussion is based on an analysis of foundational texts, exploring the ideas of authority at the international level expounded by Grotius and Vitoria, before moving on to work by more recent authors.

In “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe famously argues against the main thrust of European ethical philosophy since the mid-seventeenth century. Her main complaint is that the conceptual structure of modern moral philosophy – focusing on obligation, duty, right, and wrong, rather than the classical Greek focus of virtue and the good life – cannot be sustained without divine legislation, which many moderns have tried to avoid. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant will carefully analyze both canonical and lesser known texts to demonstrate that philosophers of the period have resources to answer Anscombe’s Challenge. Many of the philosophers studied were central in this: early modern natural lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes; critics of natural law, like Leibniz and Shaftesbury; moral sentimentalists Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith; rationalists like Clarke, Price, and Reid; and, of course, Kant. One of the most interesting sources of response is a connection many philosophers made between morality and accountability and insights they had about the psychological prerequisites and presuppositions of accountability.

Hugo Grotius is best known as one of the originators of international law. Philosophers of the period also saw him as making a fundamental break with ancient philosophy and Thomistic classical natural law deriving from Aristotle. Grotius carried forward an important distinction made by Francisco Suarez between “law” and “counsel.” Good moral reasons may counsel action without yet requiring it. Law, by contrast, obligates, and obligation is conceptually related to accountability. It concerns what we would be blameworthy for failing to do without excuse. Grotius develops a theory of natural rights and law and sets the philosophical agenda by asking what could ground such a law (Anscombe’s Challenge). His response is human “sociability,” by which he means not simply any desire to affiliate, but the drive to live with others on terms of mutual accountability.

In several smaller essays written in the late 1760s and the 1770s, Herder discussed German political history. In How the German Bishops Became an Estate of the Realm Herder spelled out his views on the ancient German constitution and the history of the Holy Roman Empire, whilst On the Influence of Governments on the Sciences, and of the Sciences on Governments returned to the political history of wider Europe, including Germany. This chapter discusses these essays as Herder’s contributions to the debate on German national spirit, highlighting the relevance of Möser’s History of Osnabrück to the development of Herder’s views on German history. I argue that Herder sought to understand the causal origins of modern European states, including, most importantly, the Holy Roman Empire. Like Möser, Herder was fascinated by Tacitus’s account of ancient German freedom, while being very critical of the Frankish polity. Both also rejected Montesquieu’s history of modern monarchy. Although Herder acknowledged some advantages of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, he was not a Reichspatriot. The 1779 essay restated Herder’s fundamental commitment to modern liberty and trade, whilst arguing that German imperial government was badly in need of reforms.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

This chapter introduces the most significant aspects of Thucydidean interpretation in the Renaissance and Reformation. It outlines key developments in the accessibility of the text (through knowledge of Greek and through translation into Latin and other European languages). It also analyses a number of key responses to the work. These include the group centred around Philipp Melanchthon, who saw Thucydides as a source of both rhetorical and moral lessons; Calvinist readings, which enlisted Thucydides to rebut Machiavelli’s views on statecraft; Grotius, who appealed to Thucydides in formulating his theory of Just War; and Thomas Hobbes’ influential translation of the text.

In the age of Big Data and machine learning, with its ever-expanding possibilities for data mining, the question of who is entitled to control the data and benefit from insights that can be derived from them matters greatly for the shape of the future economy. Therefore, this topic should be assessed under the heading of distributive justice. There are different views on who is entitled to control data, often driven by analogies between claims to data and claims to other kinds of things that are already better understood. This chapter clarifies the value of approaching the subject of control over data in terms of (a notion of moral, rather than legal) ownership. Next, drawing on the work of seventeenth-century political theorist Hugo Grotius on the freedom of the seas, and thus on possibilities of owning the high seas, I develop an account of collective ownership of collectively generated data patterns and explore several important objections. Since control over data matters enormously and is poorly understood, we should treat questions about it as genuinely open. This is a good time to bring to bear unorthodox thinking on the matter.

This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

This chapter explores the link between international law’s long-standing doctrinal commitment to commerce and its inability to act decisively on behalf of the environment. One of the fundamental rights the early authors of jus gentium discovered was the right to engage in commerce. Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius each drew on a providentialist theory of commerce. The doctrine held that Providence distributed scarcity and plenty across the Earth so that people could not be self-sufficient but would need to go in search of one another in order to acquire what they lacked. Commerce imagined in its pure form of reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange would be the means to bring separated mankind to friendship. The embrace of such doctrine by early exponents of the law of nations, carried forward by Vattel, set the stage for international law’s longstanding commitment to international commerce, viewed as a virtuous activity that tends to the common good. An additional legacy was the view of nature as commodity. The providentialist doctrine of commerce remains embedded in international law and hobbles its ability to protect the natural environment.

Disdain for Cicero is widespread among contemporary philosophers. This chapter shows this attitude is mistaken. It focuses on three topics where Cicero speaks to contemporary philosophical problems with special urgency and relevance: cosmopolitanism, aging, and friendship. Cicero’s analysis of the duties of justice and the duties of material aid in his De officiis became the foundation for much of modern international law. But his analysis suffers from a bifurcation: it makes the former fully global (national boundaries are irrelevant) and the latter very elastic. The topic of aging has been entirely neglected by philosophers. Cicero’s dialogue De senectute offers a defense of old age against stigma and prejudices: some arguments are unconvincing, but many are excellent and have much to teach us. In his De amicitia, Cicero offers a convincing critique of common self-insulating pictures of friendship and an exploration of friendship as an element of political life, of which Cicero’s long-lived friendship with Atticus is a perfect example.