In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of ‘legal posturing’ on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in this volume highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.

Stefan Eklöf Amirell is a professor of global history at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and the director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. His publications include Pirates in Paradise (2006) and Pirates of Empire: Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia (2019).

Hans Hägerdal is a Professor in History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His major fields are East and Southeast Asian history, in particular focusing on early-modern colonial encounters and enslavement. His publications include Held’s History of Sumbawa (2017) and Savu: History and Oral Tradion on an Island of Indonesia (with Geneviève Duggan, 2017).

Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian specialising in the intersection of colonisation with the history of ideas in the late eighteenth century. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences, at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Acknowledgements
Stefan Eklöf Amirell, Bruce Bucan & Hans Hägerdal: Introduction: Piracy in World History
Michael Kempe: ”Publique Enemies to Mankind“. International Pirates as a Product of International Politics
Bruce Buchan: All at Sea: Locke’s Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought
Jennifer L. Gaynor: The Colonial Origins of Theorizing Piracy’s Relation to Failed States
Hans Hägerdal: The Bugis-Makassar Seafarers - Pirates or Entrepreneurs?
Lakshmi Subramanian: Piracy in India’s Western Littoral: Reality and Representation
Joshua M. White: Holy Warriors, Rebels, and Thieves: Defining and Regulating Maritime Violence in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean
Robert J. Antony: Piracy, Empire, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial China
Birgit Tremml-Werner: Persistent piracy in Philippines waters: Metropolitan discourses about Chinese, Dutch, Japanese and Moro coastal threats, 1570-1800
Joachim Östlund & Bruce Buchan: Sweden, Barbary Corsairs and the ‘Hostis Humani Generis’: Justifying Piracy in European Political Thought
Stefan Amirell: ‘Pirates of the Sea and the Land’: Concurrent Vietnamese and French concepts of piracy during the second half of the nineteenth century
Lauren Benton: Afterword: Pirate Passages
Index