Freitas Versus Grotius (1959)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Straits Of Malacca ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The University ◽  
Inter State

This chapter considers the work of Franciscus Seraphin de Freitas, a professor at the University of Valadolid, in particular his treatise entitled De Justo Imperio Lusitanorum Asiatico, and compares his influence to that of Hugo Grotius. Freitas and Grotius were participants in a case that arose from the seizure of a Portuguese vessel in the Straits of Malacca by a Dutch Admiral employed by the Dutch East India Company. Its capture was questioned by some Company members who opposed the adjudication of the prize by the Dutch Admiralty Court. Grotius defended the case and Freitas was chosen to state a case for the King of Spain who was also then the sovereign of Portugal. The chapter argues that Freitas deserves his due place among the writers of the seventeenth century who contributed to the clarification of problems relating to the legal status of the sea and to European–Asian inter-state relations.

Cornelis Matelief, Hugo Grotius, and the King of Siam (1605–1616): Agency, initiative, and diplomacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER BORSCHBERG
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
International Law ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch Government ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Chinese Market ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
Supreme Commander

AbstractThis article addresses the proactive agency of the Siamese kings in cementing commercial and diplomatic ties with the Dutch in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The focus will be on two interrelated developments: one, the first diplomatic mission to the Dutch Republic in 1608–1610 and, two, a scheme hatched by Siamese officials to assist the Dutch in obtaining access to the Chinese market. This was deemed necessary after the Dutch, supported by some overseas Chinese businessmen from Southeast Asia, failed to gain trading access in 1604. On the Dutch side, two men stand in the limelight: Admiral Cornelis Matelief de Jonge, a director of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and supreme commander of its second fleet to Asia, and Hugo Grotius, who at the time was a rising star in the Dutch government and would later be celebrated as one of the pathfinders of modern international law. Both their published and unpublished manuscripts will be examined to ascertain how Matelief and the VOC directors reacted to these Siamese initiatives and how, in turn, the admiral sought to mobilize and co-opt the Siamese into his own commercial and military agenda, with the help of Grotius.

scholarly journals The Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic Muḥarrar, and Javanese Law Books: A VOC Experiment with Muslim Law in Java, 1747–1767

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmood Kooria
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Chinese Subjects

This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Muḥarrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). I argue that this assertion is baseless, and demonstrate that the very pretense is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

Luso-Johor-Dutch Relations in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, c. 1600-1623

Itinerario ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Borschberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Straits Of Malacca ◽  
Playing Fields

The study of the early European colonial presence in Asia has been stimulated in recent years by a series of excellent works. These have been both of general and specialist nature, written not only by historians, but also by political scientists as well as specialists of international relations. The truly excellent study published in 2002 by Edward Keene, can be taken as a point in case. Central to his revisitation of seventeenth-century treaties of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) with the Emperor of Kandy, is the notion of divided sovereignty expounded by Hugo Grotius around 1600-1610. It was against the backdrop of such concepts of divided sovereignty that the VOC could ultimately conclude its complex web of treaty relationships that broadly characterise the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies up the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is some legitimacy in contending that Keene's postulations effectively rework and reinterpret, at the level of international relations, what was once conveniently dubbed the ‘Age of Partnership’, i.e. an age characterised by trade-driven colonial empires that grew upon a complex, sometimes self-contradictory network of treaty relationships as well as formal and informal cooperation garnered from native elites. Admittedly such relations were often but not always based on unequal power and treaty relationships. Despite the uneven playing fields created by many such Euro-Asian treaties, especially those forged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conclusion of treaties was assumed on the basis of the nominal co-equality of sovereigns and plenipotentiary agents acting on their behalf. European and Asian treaty partners were accepted as contracting equals, and this is particularly stunning given that the feudal world of European power politics at the time was, by comparison, probably more complex and legally structured than Asia. Certainly, the underlying power relations behind these early modern agreements were completely different from those imposed by the mature colonial powers on Asia at the zenith of nineteenth-century imperialism!

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

“NOTHING IS THE WAY IT SHOULD BE”: GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TIME REGIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 821-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEBASTIAN CONRAD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Technology ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their time. They operated with a spring to store the energy, and their making required highly developed skills in casting and metalwork. The new technology made it possible to emancipate the measurement of time from sunshine and to achieve an evenness of temporal rhythms, not only during the day, but also at night.

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