SELDEN, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Mare Clausum seu De Dominio Maris Libri Duo. First edition of a "classic of maritime law" (JFB), originally drafted around 1619 at the request of James I for an Anglo-Dutch conference on fishing rights. Among the Dutch representatives was Hugo Grotius, whose Mare Liberum of 1609 had proposed that the seas were free to all.The English lawyer and antiquarian Selden's purpose was to establish the contrary, that "the lordship of the circumambient ocean belongs to the crown of Great Britain as an indivisible and perpetual appendage". The treatise was not published at the time, as some passages were felt to be potentially offensive to the King of Denmark, to whom James was deeply in debt at the time. In 1635, seeking to impress Charles I, Selden revised his work "to take account of the minimalist theory of natural law contained in Hugo Grotius's De jure belli ac pacis of 1625... [His revision] combined a lengthy, sophisticated theoretical discussion of law with a partisan and reasonably well-documented history of the exercise of maritime dominion... Written in Latin for an international audience, Mare clausum constituted a classic defence for the extreme position that states could legitimately claim and exercise extensive sovereignty over the high seas" (ODNB). "The political significance of Selden's work was instantly recognized both at home and abroad... it more correctly represented what are now the admitted principles as to the appropriation of the adjacent sea than did most of

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.