Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a Dutch jurist, political and religious thinker, statesman, and diplomat. His many writings included De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace; 1625), which is a classic of international law and political theory. He sided with the Dutch Remonstrants in their debate with Calvinists—a dispute which led to violence and resulted in his imprisonment. In 1621 he escaped and went to France where he published De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Later, he was appointed Swedish ambassador to the French court.

Grotius wrote a great deal, and his writings circulated widely in England and elsewhere. Famously, in 1635 the jurist John Selden published Mare Clausum, rejecting Grotius’s arguments for the freedom of the seas. Though the two thinkers differed on that particular topic, they resembled each other on many other points, and Samuel Pufendorf later remembered both as important precursors of his own theories concerning the laws of nature and nations. Many English writers drew on Grotius, but until now there has been relatively little scholarly research on his influence in Britain.

This innovative and scholarly book is “the first attempt to provide to Anglophone readers a full book-length account of the English reception and usage of Grotius’s work approximately from 1613 to 1718” (3). Grotius came to England in 1613, and the first English attack on his ideas about the freedom of the seas was published in that year. In 1718 John Toland’s Nazarenus appeared. It undermined the arguments which Grotius had advanced in defense of Christianity in his best-selling De Veritate Religionis Christianae (On the Truth of the Christian Religion; 1627).

The first part of Barducci’s book is about the state, resistance, and government, and discusses themes including contract, protection and allegiance, war, revolution, and ideas about republicanism and ancient constitutionalism. Part 2 surveys the uses made of Grotius’s thinking on the state, the church, and religion. It deals with theories of church-state relations and ideas about church government. The third and final section is on property and empire, with one chapter on each of these two important themes.

This book has much to say about many important writers and thinkers, including Anthony Ascham, John Donne, Sir Robert Filmer, James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Milton, William Prynne, John Selden, and James Tyrrell. It is a careful and nuanced treatment of its subject, and avoids making overly broad generalizations, or reaching unjustifiably bold conclusions. Sometimes this has the consequence that the reader may be somewhat unclear about what precisely is being claimed, and why it is important. On occasion, too, the writing is a little cumbersome. For example, we are told that “the conceptual inadequacy of either Dutch or English republicanism eventually reflects on current analyses of the Anglo-Dutch intellectual context. Without denying the close affinities and interconnections between Britain and the United Provinces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is difficult to identify a set of inherently republican ideas and works which were transposed from one country to another, without taking into account the processes of readaptation between two distinct political, social, and religious national contexts” (74). It is perhaps unclear exactly what follows from this insight. The book notes the ambiguity of Grotius on some questions, observing (for instance) his “Janus-faced reputation” as both a supporter and opponent of absolutism (25), and the author concludes that “the study of the English receptions of Grotius in the ‘century of revolution’ primarily tells us a story of influence and success, but also one of contingency and oblivion” (187). The striking claim is advanced that “virtually everybody in England, regardless of their beliefs, considered Grotius the ‘greatest scholar of the century’” (187), but this is not fully sustained. The book discusses at length the possibility that Hobbes was influenced by Grotius on various points, but ultimately concludes rather anticlimactically that “the relationship between Grotius and Hobbes is not substantially supported by any textual or contextual evidence” (193–94). Nevertheless, despite some problems, this book will be required reading for anyone interested in the influence of Grotius on English political thought in the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth.