Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty

Note on the Text

xxiii note on the text Upon Hugo Grotius’s death in 1645, the manuscript of De Jure Praedae remained in the possession of his descendants,theCornetdeGrootfamily , for over two centuries. In fact, legal scholars did not know of its existence until the Dutch bookseller and printer Martinus Nijhoff auctioned off Grotius’s personal papers in 1864. The manuscript was purchased by Leiden University Library. One of its humanities graduates, H. G. Hamaker (1819–92), published the first Latin edition of De Jure Praedae in 1868. His text was the basis for the English translation that Gwladys L. Williams prepared for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the middle of the twentieth century. The Liberty Fund edition of De Jure Praedae reproduces her translation , which first appeared as part of the Classics of International Law series. In addition to Williams’s translation, we reissue appendix A of the Carnegie edition, along with the superb author and subject indexes by Walter H. Zeydel. With two exceptions we have left unchanged the editorial conventions that govern Williams’s translation of DeJurePraedae . These editorial conventions are explained in full in the Translator’s Note to the Carnegie edition1 but may be summarized as follows. The words and phrases that Grotius wrote in capital letters for purposes of emphasis are printed in italic type in the body of the text. Bold type is used forwords that aresimilarlyemphasizedinGrotius’smarginal 1. Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Jure Praedae Commentarius), eds. Gwladys L. Williams and W. H. Zeydel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), vol. 1: A Translation of the Original Manuscript of 1604 by Gwladys L. Williams, with the collaboration of Walter H. Zeydel, xxvii–xxx. xxiv note on the text headings and subheadings. Williams used brackets when she felt she had amplified Grotius’s thought in translating his concise Latin phrases. The manuscript’s folio numbers appear at the end of the relevant text line, which is a change from the Carnegie edition, where they appear in the margin. The position of the folio numbers in the text approximates that of the folios in the manuscript. They should not be considered the equivalent of modern page breaks, however. Williams was frequently obliged to reverse the Latin word order of the manuscript in order to produce a flowing English translation. A comparison with the collotype reproduction of the manuscript revealsthat,inafewinstances,sheeither forgot to include the manuscript’s folio divisions or made a mistake in doing so.2 Although Williams did make some mistakes, the sometimes erratic numbering also reflects the fact that Grotius revised the theoretical chapters numerous times. Footnotes identified by arabic numerals have a threefold function in Williams’s translation: (1) to indicate gaps in the manuscript that may cause doubt regarding the original text, (2) to clear up questions that may arise from Grotius’s own correction of the manuscript, and (3) to comment on Grotius’s use of sources. Since Grotius’s quotations often are loose paraphrases of the originals, Williams translated these quotations on the basis of the manuscript text, not the text quoted. Any unavoidable departure from this rule is marked with a numbered footnote. If Grotius’s deviation from his source was “too striking to pass without comment,” Williams inserted a numbered footnote there as well.3 Page numbers listed in the footnotes of the Carnegie edition have been replaced with page numbers from the Liberty Fund edition. Oddly enough, Williams referred to the page numbers, instead of the folio numbers, of the collotype reproduction of the manuscript, which she consulted for her translation. This has been left unchanged. Footnotes that start with lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.) denote Grotius ’s references to his alleged sources, both in the running text of the manuscript and in the marginalia. Unlike the Carnegie edition, where 2. Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, 1:258, 389. 3. Ibid., 1:xxix. note on the text xxv they appear in the left and right margins, these references are placed at the bottom of the page in the current edition. Square brackets signal Zeydel’s extensions or corrections of Grotius’s references to other authors . Lettered footnotes are also used for Grotius’s cross-references to other parts of the manuscript. Many of these cross-references are of a general nature: they relate not so much to a particular article or conclusion cited by...