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

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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.

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Stelder, M. (2022). The colonial difference in Hugo Grotius: rational man, slavery and Indigenous dispossession. Postcolonial Studies, 25(4), 564–583. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1979297

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