1. Views the formation of early modern global empires and international maritime jurisdiction through the popular subject of piracy at both a local and global scale; 2. Broad chronological and geographical focus bridging places and periods not normally discussed in parallel; 3. Brings together new approaches and perspectives advanced by emerging researchers within the field. In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. This collection of original case studies addresses these early modern problems in three sections: first, states’ attempts to exercise jurisdiction over seafarers and their actions; second, the multiple predatory marine practices considered ‘piracy’; and finally, the many representations made about piracy by states or the seafarers themselves. Across nine chapters covering regions including southeast Asia, the Atlantic archipelago, the North African states, and the Caribbean Sea, the complexities of defining and criminalizing maritime predation is explored, raising questions surrounding subjecthood, interpolity law, and the impacts of colonization on the legal and social construction of ocean, port, and coastal spaces. Seeking the meanings and motivations behind piracy, this book reveals that while European states attempted to fashion piracy into a global and homogenous phenomenon, it was largely a local and often idiosyncratic issue.
List of Abbreviations, Commonly Used in Notes, List of Tables, List of
Maps, Introduction - John Coakley, C. Nathan Kwan, David Wilson, SECTION I:
Jurisdiction,
Chapter One: Local Maritime Jurisdiction in the Early English
Caribbean - John Coakley,
Chapter Two: Primitive, Peregrinate, Piratical:
Framing Southeast Asian Sea-Nomads in Nineteenth Century Colonial Discourse
and Imperial Practice - Martin Müller, SECTION II: Practices,
Chapter Three -
Scots, Castilians, and Other Enemies: Piracy in the Late Medieval Irish Sea
World - Simon Egan,
Chapter Four - Boston, Logwood, and the Rise and Decline
of the Pirates, 1713 to 1728 - Steven J. Pitt,
Chapter Five: Pirate
Encounters and Perceptions of Southern-Netherlandish Sailors on the North Sea
& the Indian Ocean, 1704-1781 - Wim de Winter, SECTION III: Representations,
Chapter Six: A Fellow! I think, in all Respects, worthy your Esteem and
Favour: Fellowship and treachery in A General History of the Pyrates,
1724-1734 - Rebecca James,
Chapter Seven: Henry Glasby: Atypical Pirate or a
Typical Pirate? - James Rankine,
Chapter Eight, Our Affairs with the
Pyratical States: The United States and the Barbary Crisis, 1784-1797 - Anna
Diamantouli,Afterword - Claire Jowitt, Bibilography, Index.
John Coakley is an historian of early America and the Atlantic world, focusing on maritime predation in the Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Piracies of some Little Privateers: Language, Law and Maritime Violence in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean, Britain and the World, 13:1 (2020), 6-26. C. Nathan Kwan teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Qing Chinas maritime relations with the West. He is the author of Barbarian Ships sail Freely about the Seas: Qing Reactions to the British Suppression of Piracy in South China, 1841-1856, Asian Review of World Histories, 8 (2020): 83-102. David Wilson is lecturer in maritime history at the University of Strathclyde. His research interests include early modern piracy, maritime law, and coastal communities. He is the author of Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century: Pirates, Merchants, and British Imperial Authority in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, 2021).
