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other nation that sent ships to sea, which eventually came to mean pretty much all
of Europe. And so it was via a series of objections to Tordesillas that international
law slowly took form.
The laurels for founding the law of the sea, and international law more gener-
ally,usuallygotothebrilliantDutchscholaroftheearlyseventeenthcentury,Huig
de Groot, better known by his Latin name of Grotius. But to my mind that hon-
our belongs equally to John Selden, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, took
up the legal challenges that de Groot posed and thereby laid the foundations of a
workable law of the sea. De Groot thought the sea could not be subject to claims
ofsovereignty,whereasJohnSeldendid.SeldendidnotarguethattheSouthChina
Sea, in particular, was under any state's dominion - indeed, at the time he would
have argued that it wasn't - but he did hold that the sea could be possessed by a
state just as land could. This, curiously, is the argument that China makes today.
What John Selden thought about the South China Sea we will never know, but
he did think about the law of the sea, which is inarguably a strong visual feature of
the map he acquired. His interest in the law of the sea was a specialised variation
of everyone's interest, for the sea in his day had the attention of the entire world.
As an indication of how wide that interest was, we need simply note the estimate
of one European historian that by 1660, a year after the Selden map entered the
Bodleian Library, ten thousand European ships were at sea in search of commod-
ities and markets. Not all of them were on their way to Asia, certainly, but many
were. There is no way of counting the number of Asian vessels engaged in the
same pursuit, but the count would surely go higher than ten thousand. For this was
a world in which Europeans were able to sail around the globe and trade between
regionaleconomiesbecausesailorswhowerenotEuropeanhadalreadycreatedthe
regional trade networks on which global trade would depend. In the seventeenth
century European mariners were the supporting cast in an essentially Asian drama.
As yet they enjoyed few technological advantages over their Asian counterparts.
As Louis Lecomte, a Jesuit missionary who journeyed to China, testified, Chinese
were able to sail the open seas 'as securely as the Portuguese'. He should have
known,forhehadtakenpassage onbothChinese andPortuguese ships.Fromboth
ends, the world was being rewoven nautically into a unity.
John Selden sensed better than most that he lived in an age undergoing a sea
change: new philosophies and new constitutions, new corridors of trade and new
forms of wealth, new ideas about the right relationship between the individual and
everything taking place around him. Some who had once lived under divinely or-
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