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From the Caribbean to Craignish: Imperial Authority and Piratical Voyages in the Early Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Commons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2018

David Wilson
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Abstract

Whereas seventeenth-century piracy has been recognised as an integrated component of the developing European Atlantic world, eighteenth-century pirates have been marginalised as an isolated group with few ties to landed communities. Such evaluations have stressed the heightened extension of state authority to the colonial theatre in the eighteenth century and, by doing so, have overlooked how pirates continued to interact with colonial actors operating in contested and unclaimed regions throughout the Atlantic commons. It is imperative that the Atlantic commons is given full consideration in any discussion of Atlantic maritime activity as it was within these expanses that inter-imperial, inter-colonial, and cross-border colonial actors converged. This article utilises the piratical voyage captained by Howell Davies (and later Bartholomew Roberts) to demonstrate that it was within this commons that eighteenth-century piratical voyages were sustained and facilitated through the forced acquisition of supplies, through markets for plundered goods, and through the opportunities available for dispersing amongst landed communities at the end of expeditions. Continued connections between colonial denizens and pirates in the eighteenth century compels a reassessment of pirates’ isolation to instead place them within the wider population of coastal traders, sojourning mariners, and marginal colonial settlers who existed both within and outside of the imperial framework espoused by state and colonial centres. Ultimately, this questions the overall ability of European states to regulate maritime traffic when vessels sailed out of sight of established colonial ports, and beyond the practical reach of imperial authority.

Keywords

PiratesAtlantic commonsimperial authorityinter-imperial connections
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 430 - 460
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

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David Wilson’s interest is in the history of maritime predation in the early modern Atlantic world. Specifically, he examines the multilateral responses to maritime predation across state, colonial, and imperial divides. Currently, he is writing a book on the British responses to Atlantic piracy in the early eighteenth century, and beginning a new project examining the Spanish guardacosta and their impact on Anglo-Spanish relations in Europe and the Greater Caribbean. He was awarded his doctorate from the University of Strathclyde in February 2018, where he continues to teach the history of the westward enterprise and the British empire as a postdoctoral teaching assistant.

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