Pirates & Privateers: John Coakley, C. Nathan Kwan, and David Wilson's Books

Recent events demonstrate that politics and economics influence what happens in the world. This includes the ebb and flow of piracy, both now and in the past. Depending on the time and place, states tolerate it until the depredations adversely affect commerce or political objectives. This is when states take action to suppress piracy, although fully eradicating it has yet to occur. The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World investigates “the relationship between European states and maritime predation, especially in Asian, Atlantic, and European waters between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.” (11)

As the editors point out in the introduction, the lack of a clear-cut definition of who is a pirate complicates these issues as well our attempts to study this phenomenon. To counteract this, these essays focus on specific cases in defined areas, such as the Caribbean or Southeast Asia. The book is divided into three sections: Jurisdiction, Practices, and Representations. The first pertains to how states seek to control seafarers and what they do. The second looks at moments in time when those seafarers are deemed to be pirates. The final section involves how the states or pirates themselves see them. As a result, readers comprehend common themes: “the relationship between pirates and states; the numerous and overlapping motivations for maritime predation; and, finally, the ways in which certain sea raiders were rhetorically made into pirates.” (12)

The editors also examine legal attempts to define piracy and how states use pirates to their advantage when it suits their purpose and suppress them when it does not. The disparity in definitions and individual states’ prejudices play roles in this, as shown in Martin Müller’s “Primitive, Peregrinate, Piratical: Framing Southeast Asian Sea-Nomads in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Discourse and Imperial Practice,” and Anna Diamantouli’s “‘Our Affairs with the Pyratical States’: The United States and the Barbary Crisis, 1784-1797.”

Although the essays discuss actions of a state either for or against pirates, the state’s viewpoint is not the only one presented. Individual authors also analyze the seafarers and what they do before looking at the state’s conduct. What becomes apparent in reading these contributions is that discord at sea, commerce, and colonial expansion are intricately interwoven and as such, generate and intensify the factors that lead to piracy. Examples of this are found in Simon Egan’s “Scots, Castilians, and Other Enemies: Piracy in the Late Medieval Irish Sea World,” John Coakley’s “Local Maritime Jurisdiction in the Early English Caribbean,” and Steven J. Pitt’s “Boston, Logwood, and the Rise and Decline of the Pirates, 1713 to 1728.”

Media coverage also impacts how citizens view pirates and their depredations. Cultural bias influences these presentations, as do how the states wish the public to perceive, for good or bad, those responsible. This leads to misleading interpretations and tropes that cause us to either romanticize or demonize pirates, instead of seeing them for who and what they really are. Sometimes, even the pirates themselves influence how we see them. These are aspects discussed in Wim de Winter’s “Pirate Encounters and Perceptions of Southern-Netherlandish Sailors on the North Sea and the Indian Ocean, 1704-1781,” James Rankine’s “Henry Glasby: Atypical Pirate or a Typical Pirate?”, and Rebecca James’s “‘A Fellow! I think, in all Respects, worthy your Esteem and Favour’: Fellowship and treachery in A General History of the Pyrates, 1724-1734.”

This volume is part of the Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea series, which examines the cultural transitions from land to oceans as regards commerce, exploration, and travel. In addition to the eight essays found within these pages, there are tables and maps, a bibliography, and an index. Each chapter includes an abstract, keywords, footnotes, and its own list of consulted sources, both primary and secondary, as well as the author’s qualifications for writing the chapter. The editors introduce this volume, while Claire Jowitt pens the afterword.

This book aptly demonstrates two key points: one state’s pirates may not be defined as such by another, and that although maritime depredations exist worldwide, western views on what constitute piracy aren’t universal. For example, Müller shows that until Europeans ventured into Asian waters, piracy was “an unknown phenomenon.” (58)

Two of the most fascinating chapters, from this reviewer’s perspective, are Pitt’s and Rankine’s. While logwood often earns mention in most pirate histories, Pitt examines this subject from a different perspective and shows that its ties to Boston play a role in the rise in piracy following the War of the Spanish Succession. During this discourse, he focuses on Blackbeard and Edward Low, and shows how this seaport both facilitates piracy and influences its decline. Henry Glasby, the subject of Rankine’s chapter, is somewhat of a chameleon; the decisions he makes and the actions he takes allow him to survive both his captivity as one of Bartholomew Roberts’s crew and as a crown witness against the men with whom he serves. From his testimony we view how pirate crews work and the complexity of life aboard a pirate ship.

The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World is both insightful and compelling. The price is steep for lay readers, but the content is worth the price for those with a keen interest in pirate history and how the world’s understanding of piracy changes depending on global and individual realities at different periods in time and place. It is also highly recommended for academic collections.