Searching for Grotius: The Global Scattering of International Law

About this event

Hugo Grotius is a major figure in international law, and in international lawyers’ imagination of their field. Much more is known about his key works than about his troubled life, his work as a diligent scholar, and his experience as an intellectual entrepreneur. The Unseen History of International Law (OUP 2025) is the fruit of a years-long project that tracked the production and global reception of the first ten editions of Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis, shedding new light on how these dimensions of Grotius come together. In this book talk, Edward Jones Corredera, in conversation with Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and Megan Donaldson, will discuss how empire and war fueled the myth of Grotius, the politics of publishing in early modern Europe, why Grotius made thousands of changes to the various editions of the text, and how the annotations of abolitionists can help us reconsider the history of ideas.

This event will be of interest to scholars interested in international law, history of political thought, and book history.

About the speakers

Edward Jones Corredera is Assistant Lecturer at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. In addition to his contributions to The Unseen History of International Law he is the author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (OUP 2024) and the editor of Supplicant Empires: Searching for the Iberian World in Global History (Brepols 2025).

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History, UCL. He has published extensively on Francis Bacon and Carl Schmitt, including the forthcoming edited volume C. Schmitt, State Composition and Collapse (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2026).

Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of International Law, UCL. She has published extensively on the history and theory of international law over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and edited (with Annabel Brett and Martti Koskenniemi) History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (CUP 2021).

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