Anti-Climacus

I have an almost unlimited patience for all things Grotius, and Martine van Ittersum's Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories, and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies 1595-1615 is, at turns, quite engaging (and as close to a total reconstruction of Grotius' work on these issues in that period as is possible*), but I'm about 3/4 of the way through and having a little trouble following all the historical details, of which the book has many.

* Which is not to say the reconstruction is always convincing--though I don't do a lot of work with archival sources, so I don't know how reasonable a complaint this is. But the interpretive techniques are not clear to me:

In the chapter on the 'Spanish Black Legend,' Ittersum writes at some length about Grotius' appropriation of various anti-Iberian tropes in De jure predae, but she never addresses directly the following, somewhat important questions: 1. Did the Spanish consider Dutch independence to be fundamentally illegitimate? 2. Did the Spanish actually commit atrocities against the peoples of the new world, in part because they refused to convert to Catholicism? 3. Did the Portuguese commit atrocities against Dutch sailors in the East Indies? In all three cases, so far as I can tell, the answer is 'yes' (the discussion of Spanish military and economic pressures against the Netherlands comes up in later chapters). The question, it seems, is less whether those tropes are used for rhetorical purposes, but rather, how realistic the danger to the Netherlands really was (power asymmetries, which should loom when considering the Dutch v. the Spanish/Portuguese at the beginning of the 17th century, are rarely mentioned), and I can't quite put my finger on the underlying assumption that makes these concerns overblown, in Ittersum's estimation.