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prof. dr. Louis Sicking

Endowed Professor, Faculty of Law, Legal Theory and Legal History

Endowed Professor, Kooijmans Institute

Endowed Professor, Research Programmes - Law, Boundaries of Law

Personal information

Louis Sicking is the Aemilius Papinianus professor of History of Public International Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since 1 September 2013. Since 2001 he lectures Medieval and Early Modern History at Leiden University. Previously he worked at the European Parliament in Brussels, Luxemburg and Strasbourg. Sicking did a research master in overseas history at the University of Aix-en-Provence (Aix-Marseille I) and took his doctoral thesis in 1996 at Leiden University. He was a visiting fellow at Columbia University in New York City, NTNU Trondheim and at IMF-CSIC Barcelona, and held fellowships from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Institute for Advances Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) and the Norwegian government.

Expertise
Medieval and early modern history, maritime and overseas history, history of international public law, and the history of diplomacy and international relations in the medieval and early modern periods.

Research

Louis Sicking conducts research in the programme Boundaries of Law. Some of his projects:

Prize Law, Procedure and Politics in the Low Countries, 15th-16th centuries
Grotius in The Hague. A Walking Tour in the Capital of International Law
Imperial Diplomacy: Cornelis de Schepper (Scepperus) as Ambassador of Emperor Charles V
Risk management, interest groups and legislation. Local, regional and international dynamics in the maritime transport sector of the Low Countries, c. 1550-1650
Louis Sicking receives NWO grant for Maritime Conflict Management in Atlantic Europe
Managing Markets: Commercial Institutions in the Principalities of the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries, Senior Research Project VU-VUB-FWO Belgium, 2019-2024.

Main publications

Sicking, Louis, 'Beyond the Free Sea. The Law of the Sea in Renaissance Europe' in: R. Lesaffer ed., The Cambridge History of International Law VI International Law in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2025) 107-134.
Sicking, Louis, 'European Expansion in the Indian Ocean and Pacific, 1450-1850' in David Parrott and Gábor Ágoston eds., The Cambridge History of War III War and the Early Modern World (Cambridge 2025) 231-254.
Sicking, Louis, 'History of the Hanse: Construction and Deconstruction', History Compass 22 no. 3 (2024) pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12798
Sicking, Louis, and Maurits Ebben eds., Beyond Ambassadors. Consuls, Missionaries, and Spies in premodern Diplomacy (Leiden and Boston 2021)
Sicking, Louis and Alain Wijffels eds., Conflict Management in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1000-1800. Studies in the History of International Law 15 (Leiden and Boston 2020)
Sicking, Louis, 'The Medieval Origin of the Factory or the Institutional Foundations of Overseas Trade: Toward a Model for Global Comparison', Journal of World History 31 no. 2 (2020) 295-326.
Sicking, Louis & Nimwegen, Olaf, van & Prud'Homme van Reine, Ronald & Vliet, Adri, van & Groen, Petra, The Eigthy Years War. From Revolt tot Regular War, 1568-1648 (Leiden 2019)
Sicking, Louis, 'The Pirate and the Admiral. Europeanisation and Globalisation of Maritime Conflict Management', Journal of the History of International Law 20 no. 4 (2018) 429-470.
Sicking, Louis, La naissance d'une thalassocratie. Les Pays-Bas et la mer à l'aube du siècle d'Or (Paris 2015)
Sicking, L.H.J., and C.H. van Rhee eds., Briève instruction en causes civiles. Filips Wielant verzameld werk II (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Wetenschappen van België 2009)
Sicking, Louis, Colonial Borderlands. France and the Netherlands in the Atlantic in the 19th century (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 2008)
Sicking, Louis, Neptune and the Netherlands. State, Economy and War at Sea in the Renaissance (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2004)