Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace could be described as a stately circumnavigation of the juridical world. Like Tolstoy’s later novel of similar name, it provides a teeming, sprawling overview of the richness of life – legal life, of course, in the case of Grotius. Unlike Tolstoy’s novel (unfortunately), Grotius’s treatise is excruciatingly pedantic. Grotius may have been a towering intellect, but he is no one’s candidate for a great stylist. His substantive message comes perilously close to being drowned in a veritable torrent of intimidating – and often tedious – displays of classical and biblical learning. In this respect, the remorseless humanist maestro shows no mercy to his benumbed and beleaguered readers. In short, as a writer, he was his own worst enemy.

It is important, however, to rescue Grotius from his own shortcomings, as he had so much of substance to say – to our time as well as to his own. To that end, this edition of his great treatise ruthlessly prunes the dense overgrowth of classical and biblical display, to allow the substantive ideas of Grotius to be absorbed in straightforward (or at least relatively straightforward) form by modern readers. When the text is stripped of its vast array of baroque scholastic ornament, the present-day reader can discern a remarkable mind at work. It is a mind that soars high, but also burrows deep. It expounds the loftiest and most abstract general principles – but also applies them in the nooks and crannies of everyday life.