''Mare Liberum'' (or ''The Freedom of the Seas'') is a book in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

international law International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...

written by the

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius, first published in 1609. In ''The Free Sea'', Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. The disputation was directed towards the Portuguese Mare clausum policy and their claim of monopoly on the East Indian Trade. Grotius wrote the treatise while being a counsel to the

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( nl, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC) was a chartered company established on the 20th March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies into the first joint-stock ...

over the seizing of the Santa Catarina Portuguese carrack issue. The work was assigned to Grotius by the Zeeland Chamber of the Dutch East India Company in 1608. Grotius' argument was that the sea was free to all, and that nobody had the right to deny others access to it. In chapter I, he laid out his objective, which was to demonstrate "briefly and clearly that the Dutch ..have the right to sail to the East Indies", and, also, "to engage in trade with the people there". He then went on to describe how he based his argument on what he called the "most specific and unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first principle, the spirit of which is self-evident and immutable", namely that: "Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it." From this premise, Grotius argued that this self-evident and immutable right to travel and to trade required (1) a right of innocent passage over land, and (2) a similar right of innocent passage at sea. The sea, however, was more like air than land, and was, as opposed to land, ''common property of all'': ''Mare Liberum'' was published by Elzevier in the spring of 1609. It has been translated into English twice. The first translation was by Richard Hakluyt, and was completed some time between the publication of ''Mare Liberum'' in 1609 and Hakluyt's death in 1616. However, Hakluyt's translation was only published for the first time in 2004 under the title ''The Free Sea'' as part of Liberty Fund's "Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics" series. The second translation was by Ralph Van Deman Magoffin, associate professor of Greek and Roman History at

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. This translation was a part of a debate on free shipping during the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

,See

Freedom of the seas Freedom of the seas ( la, mare liberum, lit. "free sea") is a principle in the law of the sea. It stresses freedom to navigate the oceans. It also disapproves of war fought in water. The freedom is to be breached only in a necessary inter ...

. and was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and

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in 1916 as ''The Freedom of the Seas, Or, The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade''.

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in the de Koninklijke Bibliotheek * The 1648 Ex Officina ELZEVIRIANA edition o
Mare Liberum, Sive De iure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia Dissertatio
republished by Elsevier B.V. in 2013 with {{ISBN, 978-1-4832-8303-6
Mare Liberum (1609) and The Freedom of the Seas (1916) – HTML and PDF versions at Liberty Fund

The Freedom of the Seas (1916) – formatted PDF at the Wikimedia Commons

The Story of Mankind (1921), pg. 272
1609 books Books by Hugo Grotius International waters Legal history of the Dutch Republic Philosophy and thought in the Dutch Republic 1609 in law

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