Research conducted in this project explores the historical and contemporary relationship between Dutch empire, public international law, and colonisation and decolonisation from a critical perspective. While extensive research has been done on the role of British and Spanish Empire in the making of international law, research is much less advanced with respect to Dutch empire and its role in the formation of colonial and postcolonial international law.

Early modern international law developed inter alia in relation to the expansion of Dutch (commercial) empire. In the context of this project, Nijman works on a monograph on the law of nature and nations in the work of Hugo Grotius, with the preliminary title ‘Reading Grotius between Promise and Failure’, and on a paper entitled ‘Grotius on Manhattan: International law and the Dutch colonisation of First Nations dwelling grounds in North America (1609-1625-1645)’. Ahead of that piece, the EJIL:Talk! Blog has published ‘Empire by Purchase: From Manhattan to Greenland (1625-2025) in February 2025.

The City of Amsterdam had a prominent role in the Dutch Republic and as the host city of both the East India Company (VOC) and the West India Company (WIC) headquarters during the 17^th century. Together with Prof Dave De ruysscher (Tilburg University), Nijman has edited a book entitled Amsterdam: Sovereignty and Legal Agency of a Commercial City (17th Century), which examines the legal and institutional history of the city of Amsterdam against the backdrop of the seventeenth century dynamics of a world in flux. It focuses on the agency and autonomy of the city, in relation with its political economy, and from a combined local, regional and international perspective. The volume includes a chapter written together with Arjan de Koomen on Amsterdam’s 17th-Century City Hall: A Cosmological Iconography of Local Government, Global Trade, and Universal Law. It will be published with Brill’s Legal History Series later in 2025.

The project then aims to move to the study of Dutch Empire and International Law in the 19^th and 20^th century. With ‘Marked Absences: Locating Gender and Race in International Legal History’ (EJIL 30(2), 2020), a first publication was realised and a basic research agenda has been laid down. This resolves around questions on how international law was used by the Kingdom of The Netherlands and international lawyers to argue for and against colonisation and decolonisation and how these arguments contributed to the (re)making of international law in the 19^th and 20^th century. By examining the relationship between international law and Dutch empire from the late 19^th century to the present, the project aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have been shaped in the context of Dutch colonialism and decolonisation, and Dutch imperialism more broadly, and how these contexts and projects have impacted the Dutch tradition of international law.

The project aims to host PhD candidates who are interested in conducting research on the practice of international and colonial law and politics in Dutch empire, on the conflicts evoked, and on the Dutch participation in the making of international law through its legal argumentations on colonisation and decolonisation. The project is open to various approaches, intellectual history, social-legal history, and so on, as it is inter-disciplinary in its collaboration ambitions. Seeking dialogue with historians, philosophers, (legal-)sociologists, and theologians. While public international lawyers have neglected the analyses of the relationship between international law and Dutch empire, scholars from the aforementioned disciplines have done crucial work on Dutch empire.

Finally, Nijman has started a second monograph project with the preliminary title ‘History and Politics of Conscience in International law’. It aims to develop an in-depth analysis of the history and politics of conscience in international law from the 15^th century onwards. While a critical international legal history project, it will also ask how this relationship has operated as a foundation for contemporary international law and international legal thought and thus for world-making.

Selected research output

• Dave De ruysscher and Janne E. Nijman (Eds.), Amsterdam: Sovereignty and Legal Agency of a Commercial City (17th Century), Brill’s Legal History Series, forthcoming.
• Janne E. Nijman, ‘Empire by Purchase: From Manhattan to Greenland (1625-2025)’, 10 February 2025 EJIL Talk!
• ‘The Grotian Myth and Dutch Modern Imperialism: Blind Spots in International Law Scholarship’ in the Online Symposium at Verfassungsblog: ‘Decolonization and Human Rights in the Kingdom of the Netherlands’, León Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Wiebe Hommes (Eds.), January 2022.
• Randall Lesaffer and Janne E. Nijman (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Grotius (CUP, 2021).
• ‘An Enlarged Sense of Possibility for International Law. Seeking Change by Doing History’, in: Ingo Venzke & Kevin Jon Heller (Eds), Contingency in the Course of International Law: How International Law Could Have Been (OUP, 2021) 92-107.
• ‘Marked Absences: Locating Gender and Race in International Legal History’, 31(3) European Journal of International Law (2020): 1025–1050.
• ‘Grotius’ “Rule of Law” and the Human Sense of Justice: An Afterword to Martti Koskenniemi’s Foreword’, 40(3) European Journal of International Law (2019): 1105-1114.
• ‘Law and Governance of a global city: 17^th-century Amsterdam’, 28 and 29 October 2021, workshop (in person and online) co-organised together with Tilburg University and the Maastricht University, Roetserseiland Campus, Amsterdam.
• ‘Ius Gentium et Naturae: The Human Conscience and Early Modern International Law’, edited by Pamela Slotte & John Haskell, Christianity and International Law: An Introduction (‘Law and Christianity’ Series), (CUP, 2021) 153-176.
• 'Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium', in International law and Religion, edited by Martti Koskenniemi, Monica García-Salmones, and Paolo Amoroso (OUP, 2017).

Researcher

Dr Janne E. Nijman, Professor of History and Theory of International Law, Amsterdam School of Law, University of Amsterdam, and Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate