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5 - Privateering, Colonialism and Empires

On the Forgotten Origins of International Order

from Part I - The Imperial Past and Present in International Politics and IR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2023

By
Benjamin de Carvalho  and
Halvard Leira
Edited by
Klaus Schlichte  and
Stephan Stetter
Klaus Schlichte
Affiliation:
Universität Bremen
Stephan Stetter
Affiliation:
Universität der Bundeswehr München
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Summary

This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.

Keywords

privateeringempiresinternational orderstatesoceans
Type
Chapter
Information
The Historicity of International Politics
Imperialism and the Presence of the Past
 , pp. 104 - 122
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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