historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
all foreign fishermen to buy a license if they wanted to fish in the seas surrounding
the British Isles. This step, meant to assert the sovereignty and jurisdiction
of the English monarch in the British seas and at the same time to fill
the king’s empty coffers, was especially directed against the large Dutch herring
fleets that were accustomed to fish off the coast of Scotland and England.
The States General, fearing that a vital sector of the Dutch economy would
suffer great damage, responded immediately by sending an embassy to London.
29 The embassy set the tone for future Anglo-Dutch negotiations about
maritime disputes between the two countries. Although the Dutch managed
to persuade James I that it was in his and the Dutch mutual interest that the
king would postpone the placate, they did not manage to convince James I
that he should give up his claims to the sovereignty of the sea. On the contrary,
every time new maritime disputes arose or old ones were revived James
I, and later his son Charles I, would buttress their demands and sanctify English
actions at sea by pointing out to their royal prerogatives and their dominion
over the seas. 30
Anglo-Dutch maritime disputes in the first half of the seventeenth century
evolved around three major issues: the Dutch herring fishery off the coast of
Scotland and England, whaling in the waters surrounding Spitzbergen, and
English access to the Asian markets in the East Indies. In the first two cases
it were the Dutch that saw themselves forced to oppose British claims to a
dominium maris. In the last case, the situation was precisely the other way
around; now it were the English who pleaded freedom to navigate and to
trade against the VOC’s monopolistic policy. 31 In the case of the Spitzbergen
whale fishery the Dutch also encountered opposition from the Danish king
29 For the importance of the Dutch herring fishery for Dutch trade and the Dutch economy, see
James D. Tracy, “Herring Wars: The Habsburg Netherlands and the Struggle for Control of the North
Sea, ca. 1520-1560”, in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1993), pp. 252-54; De Vries and Van
der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 243-54; Christiaan van Bochove, “De Hollandse haringvisserij
tijdens de vroegmoderne tijd”, in Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004),
pp. 3-27.
30 The best and most elaborate accounts on Anglo-Dutch maritime rivalry during the first half of
the seventeenth century remain Samuel Muller Fz., Mare Clausum: bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der rivaliteit
van Engeland en Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Frederik Muller; Amsterdam, 1872); George Edmundson,
Anglo-Dutch Rivalry during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1911);
and Thomas Wemyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea: An Historical Account of the Claims of England to the
Dominion of the British Seas, and of the Evolution of the Territorial Waters, With Special Reference to the Rights
of Fishing and the Naval Salute (William Blackwood and sons; Edinburgh/London, 1911), esp. pp. 339-77.
31 During the Anglo-Dutch conference of 1613, which was held to solve the outstanding maritime
disputes between the two countries, the English used some of the arguments Grotius had put forward
in Mare Liberum against its author who, as one of the Dutch negotiators, now had to defend the interests
and the monopoly of the VOC in the East Indies. Roelofsen, “Hugo de Groot en de VOC”, p. 64. See for
this turn of Grotius also I.J.A. Nijenhuis, “De ontwikkeling van het politiek-economische vrijheidsbegrip
in de Republiek”, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.), Vrijheid: een geschiedenis van
de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam University Press; Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 237-38.
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