The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World

Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-94-6372-096-0
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 290 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 238 mm, Gewicht: 592 g

Reihe: Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, David

Coakley, John

Kwan, Nathan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Schifffahrt

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Coakley, John
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.

Wilson, David
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).

Kwan, Nathan
C. Nathan Kwan teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Qing China’s 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.