Abstract
During the Commercial Revolution, as European powers became deeply involved in Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade, there developed a lively debate about whether a country could claim and exercise legal sovereignty over the sea. The great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), in his work Mare Liberum (1609), argued against such notions. An English lawyer and polymath John Selden (1584–1654), espousing British interests, took the affirmative side of the debate in Mare Clausum (1936). The issues had been discussed long before Grotius and Selden had written their works, but the debate intensified as the competition both for worldwide markets and for access to offshore fishing banks became sharper.
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