ABSTRACT
The student of international relations today finds the works of Hugo Grotius difficult to read, even in English translation, encumbered as they are with the biblical and classical learning with which in Grotius' generation it was thought helpful to buttress theoretical arguments. The occasion for Grotius' work on the law of prize was the capture in 1603 of a Portuguese vessel in the Straits of Malacca by a vessel of the Dutch East India Company, and with it a great deal of booty. The independent political communities with which Europeans in Grotius' time were coming into contact in the Americas, on the coast of Africa, and in south and south-east Asia were, in his view, part of the great society of states. In Grotius' time these institutions existed only in embryo; the international society he describes is an ideal or normative one, for which there was as yet little concrete historical evidence.
