Savage Republic: De Indis of Hugo Grotius, Republicanism and Dutch Hegemony within the Early Modern World-System (c. 1600-1619)

Intended for the professional academic and graduate student, this book is the first to utilize the methodology of New Stream legal scholarship in an extended critical exegesis of Hugo Grotius’ De Indis (c.1604-6). De Indis is predicated upon a two-fold discursive strategy: (i) investing private Trading Companies with public international legal personality, and (ii) collapsing the distinction between private and public warfare. Governing the operation of textual interpretation is De Indis’ status as a republican treatise juridically legitimating an early modern Trans-National corporation (the VOC) that served as an agent of a primitive system of global governance, the early Capitalist World-Economy. The application of New Stream scholarship reveals that the republican signature of De Indis consists of a discursive micro-oscillation between the thick ontology of Late Scholasticism ( Utopia ) and the thin ontology of Civic Humanism ( Apology ) wholly appropriate to the governance requirements of the embryonic Modern World-System.