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.

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 is an assistant professor at the University of Macau. 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.

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).

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