In 1782 he said, "In general, I would only observe that commerce, consisting in a mutual exchange of the necessaries of life, the more free and unrestrained it is the more it flourishes and the happier are all the nations concerned in it." The American assertion of the principle of freedom of the seas thus became closely connected to the principle of freedom of commerce. For my own part, I think nature wiser than all the courts and estates of the world, and, therefore, I wish all her seas and rivers upon the whole globe free.īenjamin Franklin was of the same mind. The powers of Europe, however, cannot agree as yet, in adopting them to their full extent …. The United States of America have propagated far and wide in Europe the ideas of the liberty of navigation and commerce. political leaders championed the view that the seas ought to be free in war as well as in peace. Despite Grotius's efforts, European mercantilist powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generally sought to control as much of the world's oceans as they could.įrom the beginning of the American nation, U.S. Grotius defined the seas as being, like the air, limitless and therefore common to all people. Later, Queen Elizabeth I of England proclaimed: "The use of the sea and air is common to all neither can any title to the ocean belong to any people or private man." Perhaps the most notable assertion of the principle of freedom of the seas was the book Mare Liberum (1609) by Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. It was on the principle of freedom of the seas that King Francis I of France disputed the exclusive right in certain seas that the pope had granted to Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century. The concept of freedom of the seas predates the American nation, arising in the European world amid the heightened rivalries of the European state system in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM OF THE SEAS Historically, it has been one of the chief means by which the United States has influenced international affairs the vigorous assertion of the principle of freedom of the seas has been a major cause of four armed conflicts: the Quasi-War with France in 1798, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, and World War I. American statesmen have, in essence, defined it as the right of all peoples to travel unmolested in international waters in both war and peace. Freedom of the seas is one of the original and most important principles in the history of American foreign policy.
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