Can States Become Merchants? Hugo Grotius in Iberia and Latin America, c. 1630s–1860s

Abstract This article traces the reception and transformation of Hugo Grotius’s ideas on succession, sovereignty, and public law across the Iberian and Latin American worlds from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis served as a legal manual and a conceptual arsenal for rulers, reformers, and rebels who sought to resolve the problems that emerged from the fracturing of imperial structures and the birth of new states. From Catalan and Portuguese invocations of agnatic right and usufructuary kingship, to Latin American constitutional debates over revolution and tyrannicide, Grotius’s writings were used to legitimate political authority and contesting its abuses. As Iberian monarchs struggled to impose their rule, and Latin American republicans reimagined sovereignty in commercial terms, Grotius’s influence endured. Grotius’s work mediated the transition from monarchical succession to commercial and contractual statehood, until the United States harnessed his anti-tyrannical discourse to legitimate its imperial ambitions. In response, Latin American states came to claim the rights of those corporations that Grotius had once endowed with the potential to be sovereign.