 Most criticisms of Grotius’ theory focus on his defense of absolute sovereignty, but the focus here is on his account of group-based possession implicit in his justification for territory. The central difficulty is that Grotius’s account of possession does not have a scope limitation. It’s not clear that he has the conceptual resources to establish limits to the area that a group can claim (or possess). He did, however, recognize a right of necessity and other moral rights (to passage, settlement, commerce, use of water, rights of refuge), which means that some sharing would be required by an appropriator. For their part, incomers would be required to submit to the sovereign (Grotius DJB II,2, xvii). This suggests that he envisions state jurisdiction as encompassing large areas that are not possessed or occupied in the normal sense, and some might argue that it is counter-intuitive that a single group should be able to claim sovereignty over vast tracts of land, as the European empires did in the ‘Age of Discovery’, and require that all peoples and migrants simply submit to their rules. 