This chapter explores the link between international law’s long-standing doctrinal commitment to commerce and its inability to act decisively on behalf of the environment. One of the fundamental rights the early authors of jus gentium discovered was the right to engage in commerce. Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius each drew on a providentialist theory of commerce. The doctrine held that Providence distributed scarcity and plenty across the Earth so that people could not be self-sufficient but would need to go in search of one another in order to acquire what they lacked. Commerce imagined in its pure form of reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange would be the means to bring separated mankind to friendship. The embrace of such doctrine by early exponents of the law of nations, carried forward by Vattel, set the stage for international law’s longstanding commitment to international commerce, viewed as a virtuous activity that tends to the common good. An additional legacy was the view of nature as commodity. The providentialist doctrine of commerce remains embedded in international law and hobbles its ability to protect the natural environment.

As the noble elites in Elizabethan England were preparing their anti-imperial and anti-papal strategies, they received welcome assistance from the civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, a protestant refugee interested in combining his Roman law expertise with the kind of humanist statesmanship that was appreciated by his English interlocutors and that had flourished among North Italian city-states at the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Gentili wrote on the need to combine insights from history with a critical “philosophical” attitude – an orientation he identified in jurisprudence. He insisted on limiting the jurisdiction of theologians to the internal world of the faithful and on the absolute duty of obedience to the king, even when he had turned a tyrant. But Gentili remained blind to the principles of good government that were being developed under the anti-legal vocabulary of the ragion di stato by Italian Counter-Reformation strategists such as Giovanni Botero.