Contract Colonialism

Contract Colonialism explores how ideas about contract, land purchase, and consent have been mobilized within a Dutch colonial-legal imaginary to render Indigenous peoples responsible for their own dispossession and enslavement while presenting conquest as innocent and inevitable. It shows how contract colonialism emerged in the early modern moment and became a global export product.

The book takes as its starting point the cultural-legal imaginary of United Dutch East India Company spokesperson, early modern humanist, and so-called founding father of international law Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) whose work has shaped global imperial formations, but has remained largely unexamined in (settler) colonial studies in favor of more Anglocentric genealogies that begin with Locke.

Grotius and Dutch imperialists emphasized the importance of purchasing land from Indigenous peoples - the myth of the Dutch purchase of Manahahtáanung (Manhattan, 1624) is a case in point here. Grotius's innovation was to devise a legal system where the Dutch could wage wars and enslave and colonize the Indigenous population if that population refused to engage in trade and contract. His work produced a shift away from a Spanish Christianizing mission to a Dutch colonial-racial logic steeped in a discourse of trade and navigation that has reverberated across empires.

By positing contract colonialism as a central modality of empire formation, the book aims to unsettle the distinction between the nonviolence of purchase and the violence of conquest and argues that contract colonialism conditioned the violent acquisition of power and lands around the globe based on racialized ideas about property acquisition and defense. It argues that the Grotian imaginary continues to form the backbone of a justificatory logic of racial capitalist expansion.

A preliminary study for this book has appeared as “The Colonial Difference in Hugo Grotius: Rational Man, Slavery and Indigenous Dispossession” in Postcolonial Studies.