"Commissioned in October 1604 by the United Dutch East India Company, Hugo Grotius's Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty was intended to justify the Dutch capture in 1603 of a wealthy Portuguese merchantman, the Santa Catarina, in the Strait of Singapore. In a clever and intricate defense of international free trade, Grotius (1583-1645) introduced the notion of a man as a sovereign and free individual with a right to self-defense and, by extension, the right of a company of private merchants to establish a trade empire."--Jacket.
This book is a fundamental reassessment of the nature and impact of legal humanism on the development of law in Europe. It brings together the foremost international experts in related fields such as legal and intellectual history to debate central issues
This book examines the status of private actors as subjects of law under the rules of the international law of the sea. Providing a methodology for the notion of a single legal personality, it provides a clear understanding of membership in international law in order to establish to what extent private actors can be rights-holders or duty-bearers. It does this by taking a theoretical perspective which allows the reader to interpret their relevance in international law. This unique and innovative work makes a significant contribution to the current scholarly debates on private actors in international law.
As our society becomes more global, international law is taking on an increasingly significant role, not only in world politics but also in the affairs of a striking array of individuals, enterprises, and institutions. In this comprehensive study, David J. Bederman focuses on international law as a current, practical means of regulating and influencing international behavior. He shows it to be a system unique in its nature—nonterritorial but secular, cosmopolitan, and traditional. Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, The Spirit of International Law ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system. After addressing philosophical concerns about authority and obligation in international law, Bederman considers the sources and methods of international lawmaking. Topics include key legal actors in the international system, the permissible scope of international legal regulation (what Bederman calls the "subjects and objects" of the discipline), the primitive character of international law and its ability to remain coherent, and the essential values of international legal order (and possible tensions among those values). Bederman then measures the extent to which the rules of international law are formal or pragmatic, conservative or progressive, and ignored or enforced. Finally, he reflects on whether cynicism or enthusiasm is the proper attitude to govern our thoughts on international law. Throughout his study, Bederman highlights some of the canonical documents of international law: those arising from famous cases (decisions by both international and domestic tribunals), significant treaties, important diplomatic correspondence, and serious international incidents. Distilling the essence of international law, this volume is a lively, broad, thematic summation of its structure, characteristics, and main features.
The Singapore and Melaka Straits are a place where regional and long-distance maritime trading networks converge, linking Europe, the Mediterranean, eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent with key centres of trade in Thailand, Indochina, insular Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. The first half of the 17th century brought heightened political, commercial and diplomatic activity to this region. It had long been clear to both the Portuguese and the Dutch that whoever controlled the waters off modern Singapore gained a firm grip on regional as well as long-distance intra-Asian trade. By the early 1600s Portuguese power and prestige were waning and the arrival of the Dutch East India Company constituted a major threat. Moreover, the rapid expansion and growing power of the Acehnese Empire, and rivalry between Johor and Aceh, was creating a new context for European trade in Asia.
The relationship between Calvinist political theory and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government has been debated for some time, and the consensus is that Locke’s theory constitutes the further development of Calvinist theory. But upon closer analysis, that conclusion proves entirely flawed. Calvinism proves to be worlds apart from the political philosophy of John Locke. It proves to be the mature fruit of the medieval “two swords” form of government, in which church and state share public power, rather than an early stage on the road to the dissociation of church and state, a road which Locke put us firmly upon with his own formulation of political power. Indeed, upon closer inspection Calvinism proves to be the product of a thousand-year tradition of Western political thought commencing with Augustine and moving through the Carolingian Renaissance and the Papal Revolution. That history is rediscovered and outlined in this book, as the preliminary means for recovering the true meaning of political Calvinism and its utter discontinuity with the modernism that commenced with Locke’s paradigm. It also helps disabuse us of the notion that history is linear, and that progress is straightforward. Rather, it helps us to understand the deformational period of history in which we live, and the need for a return to a confessional understanding of law, the state, and constitutionalism.
Patchwork in times of plurality encompasses the multitude of actions as a revealing symbol of ethos, actors, organisms, and manifestations of preservation and dialogue frontiers. This plural metaphor, almost like a patchwork, aggregates and yet segregates, conforms, but disfigures, and boosts the meanings which represent this new field that international relations have been recently crossing. Just like the mirror metaphor - that reflects everything to all and, sometimes, intervenes in distortions - the patchwork analogy allowed the book to take responsibility for the disclosure of preservation actions on a global scale. The book has a pioneering role insofar since it is the only publication with such characteristics, concerns, and coverage. The work studies the interconnection between cultural properties and international relations by understanding them as a mosaic before the bridges that intertwine people and borders. The main goal of this work is to illustrate in what way intergovernmental relations have been privileging heritage and culture as acting fields for its broader needs. Therefore, the book addresses topics related to the international agenda, focusing on its less debated themes. Two examples of these undervalued matters are the link between actors, preservationist actions, and the universe of world cultural heritage. The book also pursuits a critical dialogue between interdisciplinary fields that narrow heritage frontiers in search to contribute with a spectrum of academic perspectives and (inter)national study cases. To serve distinct economic, social, or political purposes, institutionalized heritage (embodied by different values) becomes instrumentalized in a top-down direction. In a development frame, when we perceive culture as indispensable to human life, the past is transformed into exchange currency. Through the creation of alternative fields of action, usually in a bottom-up logic, the present builds new heritage connections. Digital heritage's preservation, dissemination, and appreciation have been representing these same nets.
