Martine Van Ittersum

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Dundee

On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, nam...

This article examines Anglo–Dutch rivalry in the Banda Islands in the period from 1609 to 1621, with a particular focus on the process of claiming initiated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and English East India Company (EIC). Historians have paid little attention to the precise legal justifications employed by these organisations, and how th...

This essay chapter analyses the working methods of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), particularly his use and referencing of ‘sources’ in his early works on natural law and natural rights. Like most early modern scholars, Grotius garnished his texts with second-hand quotations of authoritative writers (the Classics, St. Augustine, Thomas A...

Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 352 pp., isbn 978 0 2311 6428 3).

This review article discusses recent publications by David Onnekink, Sophus Reinert, Gijs Rommelse, Jacob Soil, and Arthur Weststeijn from the perspective of the reception of Dutch economic and political thought in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The Dutch Republic has been called 'the first modern economy' by Jan de Vries and Ad van de...

In May 1777, a solemn ceremony took place in the vault of the Cornets de Groot family in the New Church in Delft. A coffin containing the body of Hugo Cornets de Groot (1709–77), a great-great-grandson of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), was lowered into the vault in the presence of his two sons and three daughters. The Rotterdam burgomas...

The household academy was an important center of knowledge production in the Dutch Republic. This article analyzes the workings of one of the premier political and learned families of Holland, centered on the jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). His immediate relatives were actively involved in the process of writing and publication. They sought to s...

This article examines Grotius’ lifelong support for Dutch expansion overseas. As noted in other publications of mine, Grotius cooperated closely with the directors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the years 1604–1615. Right up to his arrest for high treason in August 1618, he contributed towards Dutch government discussions about the establ...

The possible Stoic origins of the natural rights and natural law theories of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) has been a subject of scholarly debate in recent years. Yet discussions about Grotian sociability tend to focus exclusively on the meaning of appetitus societatis in De Jure Praedae (written in 1604–1608) and De Jure Belli ac Pacis...

Following the manuscript's discovery in 1864, scholars have widely assumed that De Jure Praedae (Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty) was written by the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) in the period 1604–1606. Yet the conventional dating fails to consider the materiality of Ms. BPL 917 in Leiden University Library. By analyzing paper sup...

Thesis (Ph. D., Department of History)--Harvard University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 692-710).

Martine J. van Ittersum reviews Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Pathfinders.

This article reconstructs the printing history of Hugo Grotius's Mare liberum (The Free Sea, 1609). It examines the political circumstances which prompted the pamphlet's publication, but then seemed to conspire against it, and relates these to Grotius's revision of chapter 12 of Ms. BPL 917 in Leiden University Library, the one surviving copy of De...

This article reconstructs the voyage of the Swimming Lion to the Caribbean in 1595 and the court battle to which it gave rise. The Master mariner Gillis Dorenhoven was accused of piracy by Pedro d’Arana, contador of Havana, who sued his employers before the Middelburg Admiralty Court in 1609-1610. Johan Boreel, the eldest son of one of the defendan...

This article reconstructs Jacob van Heemskerck's second voyage to the East Indies and his capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina on 25 February 1603. It incorporates important new archival evidence like Van Heemskerck's letter to the directors of the Dutch East India Company of 27 August 1603, and the original text of the verdict of t...

An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic and Social Transition. ByWintleMichael. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 416 pp. Photographs, figures, tables. Cloth, $69.95. ISBN 0-521-78295-3. - Volume 75 Issue 1 - Martine van Ittersum