Grotius is the father of modern international law. The indivisibility of sovereignty was the sine qua non of early-modern conceptual innovation in law. Both statements are axiomatic in the mainstream literature of the last two centuries. Both are profoundly and interestingly wrong. This article shows that Grotius’ systematisation of public and international law involved defining corporations as potentially (and the VOC actually) integral to reason of state, and able to bear and exercise marks of sovereignty under certain conditions. For Grotius, some corporations were not subsumed under the state’s legal authority, nor were they hybrid ‘company-states’. Instead, states and such corporations, able and forced to cooperate, fell under dovetailing natural, international, and municipal systems of law. The article reexamines Grotius’ notion of international trade, public debt, private corporation, and public and private war through the reassembled prism of these dovetailing laws and the category of societas that underpins Grotian associations. It is argued that although formulated around the new East India trade, the actual reality of legal pluralism was available to Grotius in the Dutch trade experience of the sixteenth century.

格罗蒂乌斯是现代国际法之父。主权的不可分割性是早期现代法律概念创新的必要条件。在过去两个世纪的主流文学中，这两种说法都是不言而喻的。两者都是深刻而有趣的错误。本文显示，格罗蒂乌斯（Grotius）对公法和国际法的系统化涉及将公司定义为潜在的公司（以及VOC实际上）是国家理性不可分割的一部分，并且能够在一定条件下承担和行使主权标志。对于格罗蒂乌斯（Grotius）而言，一些公司不属于国家法律授权之下，也不属于混合的“公司国家”。相反，有能力并被迫合作的州和这类公司陷入了自然，国际和市政法律体系的对接之下。文章通过重新组合这些吻合的法律和支撑Grotian协会的社会类别，重新审视了Grotius的国际贸易，公共债务，私人公司以及公共和私人战争的概念。有人认为，尽管围绕新的东印度贸易制定了法律，但在16世纪的荷兰贸易经验中，格罗蒂乌斯仍然可以找到法律多元化的实际现实。