Varieties of secularisation in English and Dutch public and international law

Abstract

This Thesis aims to show the necessity and benefits of historically self-aware legal theory and practice in preventing and resolving conflicts that have a religious dimension. Contrary to Iberian and French colonial projects, early modern Dutch and English thinkers developed ways to encounter non-European legal systems without having to take a position on issues like missionary obligation, forcible conversion, or non-Christians’ right to property and sovereignty. This colonial advantage was a corollary of secularising ideas and steps to improve domestic stability in a time of religious conflict, including the deprioritisation of divine laws, refuting chosen nation ideologies, and subverting theology’s claim to epistemic supremacy. The new system reduced the economic and ideological costs of imperialism. Understood as a contingent, cumulative and incomplete process, and partially the unintended consequence of limited designs for stability and peace, secularisation is a useful concept in legal historiography. The examination of Dutch and English secularisation and soft imperialism offers a new perspective on the decline of French and Iberian early modern empires, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exceptionalisms. Further, it sheds light on why, when and how public international law became desensitised to the contingency of secularisation as a process, and secularism as a norm