Invisible Loot.

In ‘Invisible Loot’, published in Early Modern Low Countries (9: 2, 2025), Elsje van Kessel rethinks early modern looting – its theory, its practice, and its place in the violence of war. Using a material-culture lens, the article offers a new reading of Hugo de Groot’s De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty, 1604–1606). Van Kessel shows how the very objects Europeans loaded onto ocean-going ships shaped Dutch warfare against Spain and fuelled the building of a Dutch empire.

Image caption: Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Hugo de Groot, 1608. Museum Rotterdam. Public domain.