This article pivots around the work of early modern legal scholar Hugo Grotius to consider the political stakes of ontological assessments of the sea and water in the context of Dutch imperialism. It draws on links with land reclamation projects in the Netherlands, while at the same time ties these to urgent questions within contemporary critical water and ocean studies around water, ontology, and race. Suggesting a rethinking of Grotius’s understanding of the ocean as perpetual res nullius – perpetually ownerless (...) property – it destabilizes renditions of Grotius’s free sea as free from ownership. The ocean remains firmly within the orbit of property, the property of mankind, thereby excluding those considered non-human, including racialized, gendered, and more-than-human life forms. Grotius’s mare liberum as perpetual res nullius does not form an exception from territorial, personal, and national conceptualizations of property, but rather preconditions it – preparing the world for its thingification. I examine how this understanding of the ocean and of water has colonized our thinking of the ocean, law, being, and belonging. At the same time, the ocean’s very materiality seems to resist Grotius’s legal narrative. Although Grotius’s conquest of maritime imagination continues to justify global models of capital accumulation, the ocean always already shores up against and spills out of such reductive imaginaries. (shrink)

What is wrong with colonialism? The standard—albeit often implicit—answer to this question has been that colonialism was wrong because it violated the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, where territorial rights were grounded on acquisition theories. Recently, the standard view has come under attack: according to critics, acquisition based accounts do not provide solid theoretical grounds to condemn colonial relations. Indeed, historically they were used to justify colonialism. Various alternative accounts of the wrong of colonialism have been developed. According to some, (...) colonialism involved a violation of territorial rights grounded on legitimate state theory. Others reject all explanations of colonialism's wrongfulness based on territorial rights, and argue that colonial practices were wrong because they departed from ideals of economic, social, and political association. In this article, we articulate and defend the standard view against critics: colonialism involved a procedural wrong; this wrong is not the violation of standards of equality and reciprocity, but the violation of territorial rights; and the best foundation for such territorial rights is acquisition based, not legitimacy based. We argue that this issue is not just of historical interest, it has relevant implications for the normative evaluation of contemporary inequalities. (shrink)