The colonial difference in Hugo Grotius: rational man, slavery and Indigenous dispossession
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
(Post)colonial Dutch historiography remains saturated with the myth of the Dutch as benevolent and sometimes even reluctant imperialists geared toward trade rather than settlement. In this article, I seek to unsettle some common presumptions made on the basis of this myth through a re-reading of the work of Dutch lawyer, humanist and state ideologue Hugo Grotius. In particular, I hone in on his writings on slavery and Indigenous (dis)possession to show how colonial and racial violence structure his construction of the free sovereign subject. In doing so, I seek to intervene in existing critical scholarship on Grotius that continues to position the undifferentiated sovereign subject at the heart of his legal thought and positions him as a friend of Indigenous peoples. Applying colonial difference as a lens for reading Grotius’s work, I argue that his legal framework set up the very conditions of possibility for colonial conquest by constructing a Dutch propertied subject as universal.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it