Introduction

Summary

Piracy and the historical study of it has brought many problems for states and scholars alike. In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence in seas and oceans across the globe. Piracy in all its forms was, and still is, a worldwide phenomenon. As has been recently shown, too, it is persistent, ebbing and surging in response to political and economic pressures but never dying out completely. Though piracy therefore reaches far beyond Europe historically and geographically, the expansion of European maritime empires in the early modern period exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy, which states had to navigate and address. At times, European states addressed this problem in different ways according to their resources and interests. They might attempt to contain piracy to certain regions, co-opt maritime raiders for the state's benefit, deny maritime predation or their involvement in it, or suppress predation militarily and legally. As we have written elsewhere, contrary to the popularly held myth of pirates as the common enemies of all peoples, states only exercised power over pirates occasionally and for specific purposes. This present volume extends that argument, deeply examining the relationship between European states and maritime predation, especially in Asian, Atlantic, and European waters between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the early modern period, there were many different forms of maritime predation. Most raids were deemed lawful, conducted by either public or private agents of widely recognised states, but a significant minority was considered unlawful and therefore branded “piracy” by some or all of the states. Hans Hagerdal points to the “porous line between state-condoned warfare and sheer piracy,” meaning that at times the only difference between the two was one of perception or interpretation. States therefore eagerly sought to draw clear lines to distinguish between them in law and popular perception in order to justify their own predation and vilify that which diminished their power. Definitions of piracy abounded in early modern law, especially in the nascent field of international law that some European jurists tried to create. But due to competing interests between states, making a universal definition of piracy was easier said than done. Since there were so many ways to be a pirate, and no one could agree at the time what piracy was, one of the first problems scholars come across is a definitional one.