Because Gentili’s contribution to the law of the sea is ‘strikingly innovative’, significant, and ‘foundational’, it deserves further scrutiny. Such scrutiny is both timely and important, as developments in the law of the sea have shaped world history over the past 500 years. The chapter explores how Alberico Gentili addressed these key questions contributing to early modern developments of the law of the sea. Is the sea capable of being owned? If so, who owns the sea? Or, does the sea belong to all? Or, if ownership of the seas is materially impossible, can nations exercise some control over activity at sea? For nations and private actors alike (be they merchants and sailors as well as adventurers and pirates), the ocean of law ( oceanus iuris) was no more secure than the forces of nature and men on their maritime routes. As a result, the regulation of the world’s oceans, that is, the main conduit of movement of peoples and transmission of goods and ideas at the time, remained a site of contestation. In parallel, the existing customs addressed issues of the law of the sea only in a ‘patchy’ way, and the network of doctrinal authorities led to many inconsistencies. Only a few treaties addressed issues of the law of the sea bilaterally and in a fragmentary fashion. In the early modern period, the law of the sea ( ius maris) remained vague, incomplete, and inconsistent to a large extent.
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