The colonial difference in Hugo Grotius: rational man, slavery and Indigenous dispossession

Abstract

(Post)colonial Dutch historiography remains saturated with the myth of the Dutch as benevolent and sometimes even reluctant imperialists geared toward trade rather than settlement. In this article, I seek to unsettle some common presumptions made on the basis of this myth through a re-reading of the work of Dutch lawyer, humanist and state ideologue Hugo Grotius. In particular, I hone in on his writings on slavery and Indigenous (dis)possession to show how colonial and racial violence structure his construction of the free sovereign subject. In doing so, I seek to intervene in existing critical scholarship on Grotius that continues to position the undifferentiated sovereign subject at the heart of his legal thought and positions him as a friend of Indigenous peoples. Applying colonial difference as a lens for reading Grotius’s work, I argue that his legal framework set up the very conditions of possibility for colonial conquest by constructing a Dutch propertied subject as universal.