Pirates, it is frequently claimed, have existed since the dawn of history, as long as there has been traffic and commerce at sea. Presumably, the origins of piracy would thus be sometime in the pre-historic past, when people first took to the sea for commercial purposes, probably around eight thousand years ago, along the coast of the Persian Gulf. Historical records over close to three and half millennia, from ancient Egypt to the present, seem to provide documentation of piratical activity from all around the world. Piracy would appear to be ubiquitous across a very longue durée in the history of humanity, and only with the projection of sea power by major states and empires, whether ancient (when Rome or Srivijaya controlled their adjacent seas) or modern (when Great Britain or the United States did so) was piracy efficiently suppressed, at least temporarily.

On closer examination, however, this grand narrative has several weaknesses. As for the allegedly pre-historic origins of piracy, it is not an activity that has left distinct traces in archaeological records − unlike, for example, farming, hunting, or fishing. It may be inferred from material remains and ancient depictions that maritime violence occurred. In the absence of written sources, however, it is generally not possible to determine whether such violence was piratical by modern definitions, or by those current at the time. As Philip de Souza put it, a history of piracy can “be written only on the basis of texts which mention pirates or piracy in explicit terms, or which can be shown to refer implicitly to pirates or piracy, according to the normal usage of these terms in the culture which produced the texts.”

The alleged opposition between piracy and state power is often also much less straightforward than it may seem. Maritime raiding and violence were regularly central to the accumulation of power, wealth, and state building, whether we look to ancient Greece, medieval Scandinavia, Elizabethan England, pre-colonial Southeast Asia, or the Chinese coasts in late imperial times. As the capacity to project sea power and exercise maritime violence became institutionalized and linked to state building the need to draw a border between licit and illicit violence arose. From this perspective, the concept of piracy understood by definition as illicit violence, applies only in relation to a state or system of states (whether real or imagined).

The definition of piracy has long been a matter of interest to philosophers and politicians alike. In this chapter, we consider the philosophical and political interest in piracy by focusing on a dissertation published in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1716 by Magnus Thelaus (1687–1765), entitled: Dissertatio gradualis de piratica [On Piracy]. Of Thelaus himself very little is known, beyond the fact that after taking his Master's degree he became a lecturer in oriental languages and theology at Uppsala in 1733, and eventually rose to become a Dean of the Lutheran church. In this chapter, we use Thelaus's De piratica to explore the malleable meanings of piracy in eighteenth-century Swedish philosophical and scholarly discourse against the backdrop of Sweden's dire diplomatic situation. Various chapters in this book have considered the striking concurrence that characterized European and non-European notions of piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was not simply a matter of the coexistence of divergent understandings and cultural practices around the world, but, as we show here, of the entanglement of different discourses of piracy within one state. In this chapter, we reveal how a conventional scholarly articulation of the pirate as a “common enemy of all humankind” coexisted with an urgent but almost secret debate about the uses that may be made of pirates in statecraft.

The timing of De piratica in 1716 was especially significant. The early decades of the eighteenth century were a pivotal period in the extension of European state sovereignty at sea and with it, of the claims of European international law.

The present chapter is an attempt to respond to recent attempts at questioning the Eurocentric bias in depictions of maritime power and violence in a period of European expansion. It takes its cue from new and significant work done on the idea of legal pluralism in maritime spaces, on non-European conceptions of power and jurisdiction at sea, and on the value of using piracy as a lens for understanding the articulation of sovereignty. As the title indicates, the chapter focuses on both the materiality of maritime violence and predation as well as of its representation in Asian and European sources to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon in the context of India's western littoral, conventionally understood as the “pirate coast” par excellence. It was a dubious and inglorious reputation for sure and not necessarily the sole construction of the British colonial state, although the latter's intervention as the policeman of the seas to protect free trade lent additional semantic and political overtones to the bundle of activities that came to be designated as piracy.

In keeping with the underlying rationale of the present volume, namely, to look at non-European understandings of maritime violence, this chapter will draw attention to three important sub-themes that constituted the phenomenon of predation and raiding, as it was pursued actively by littoral society, as it was described by the early colonial state and, subsequently, by imperialist and nationalist historiography.

For at least three hundred years, since the heyday of Atlantic piracy in the early eighteenth century, pirates have been the object of a particular fascination for Europeans. As a result of this long cultural historical development, today, the word “pirate” conjures up a vast array of associations that are partly based on historical events and personalities and partly based on imagination, such as fictive accounts, songs, poems, paintings, films, and games. On the one hand, throughout European history, pirates have been associated with defiance, subversion, and rebellion, and have often been seen as constituting existential threats to society, peace and order, international trade, and the security of seafarers and coastal communities around the world. On the other hand, pirates, both historical and fictional, have also been seen as romantic heroes and non-conforming revolutionaries or champions of the common people. The word pirate, in the modern European understanding of the word, thus has a wide range of social, cultural, and political connotations that by far transcend its generic meaning of a robber or bandit operating at sea.

Against this background, the concept of piracy has been used for centuries in numerous contexts, often far removed from the original meaning of the word. This chapter explores one such case, in which the concept of piracy was stretched to its limits, namely, when the French invaded and subsequently colonized Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Introduction: The Politics of Piracy, Pillaging, and Slavery

Images of piracy lie at the heart of talk about “failed states,” a term that entered the political lexicon of the United States in the early 1990s and that came to occupy a prominent place in international peace and security. While this timing suggests that the notion of failed states and its association with piracy are recent additions to political theory, I argue here that they do not originate from the context of offshore Somalia and related international interventions in the western Indian Ocean. Instead, the failed states concept and its association with piracy may be traced to nineteenth-century colonial debates about Southeast Asia.

During the nineteenth century, colonial debates about piracy in maritime Southeast Asia encompassed views that ranged from taking piracy as a sign of state dissolution, much as it appears in contemporary failed states theory, to functionalist explanations of piracy as simply inherent to how some states worked. The latter view, in which maritime marauding was seen as a practice common to Southeast Asian statecraft, typified the much earlier remarks Tomé Pires made about coastal polities in sixteenth-century Southeast Asia. Pires, a Portuguese apothecary who spent time in Malacca shortly after the Portuguese conquest in 1511, left detailed notes about the main trade items of ports throughout Southeast Asia and beyond it, as part of his effort to plot their commercial ties with Malacca. He also recorded the naval capacity of port cities throughout the maritime world of the Indian Ocean and Asia, from the Red Sea to Japan.

Introduction

Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724) has long intrigued scholars, not least for its ambivalent tone towards its eponymous subjects – the “pyrates.” With both shocked outrage and breathless fascination, the book presented brief biographies of maritime violence and plunder, embellished and invented from the life stories some of the most notorious of Europe's pirate captains. The General History confirmed the figure of the “pyrate” very much as Cicero had defined it in the first century BCE, as the common enemy of all humankind. Yet, the implication of Johnson's text was that the “pyrate” could not literally be a hostis humani generis because an “enemy” was one who lived within a domain constituted by sovereign law. Hence, the “pyrate” could not be an “enemy” because they placed themselves outside of any sphere of sovereignty whatsoever. In the words of the “Abstract of the Civil Law and Statute Law now in Force, in Relation to Pyracy,” included towards the end of the book:

The hostis humani generis subsisting fitfully on the cruel seas beyond the reach of law was a fiction of territorial sovereignty.

Introduction

In the early seventeenth century people of Mindanao apparently “helped those of Sulu in their piratical excursions, frequently invading the beaches of our islands, destroying their fields and forests, burning their villages, forcing them into a fortress or to flee into the mountainous region of the interior.” These lines were not recorded by contemporaries, however, rather they were penned by a nineteenth-century Spanish historian of military background, Pio de Pazos y Vela Hidalgo (1841−1913), who personally participated in an expedition against Mindanao rebels in 1866. They were part of a chronological account of what he called a Military History of Jolo. It is an apt introductory quote reflecting both the key topoi and muddled chronologies of the history of piracy in the Spanish Philippines.

The main goal of this chapter is to highlight the discursive power of piracy and coastal raids in Spanish colonial reports produced in the Philippines between 1570 and 1800, with the key focus on roughly the first hundred years. The chapter focuses on the margins of the South China Sea or the waters and coasts of what is nowadays referred to as the Philippine, Sulu, and Indonesian seas. Discourses of external threat played an important role in both establishing sovereignty and in creating a sense of common political interest among different subordinate groups. For maritime Southeast Asia, non-European understandings of maritime violence and the relationship between those who talked and wrote about it and those who were accused of committing it are essential yet remain understudied. Approaching the theme through the lens of concurrent concepts of piracy can contribute to nuance long-held misconceptions of either religiously motivated raiding or spontaneous acts by opportunist seafarers.

Introduction

In recent years, scholars of the global history of piracy have begun to question the traditional view that piracy was mainly a European concept, spread around the world during the European expansion in the Early Modern period. While there have been attempts to understand piracy from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there has been less attention given to how the European and non-European concepts of piracy developed concurrently within the period of European expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Especially noteworthy has been the work of historians of international law who have pioneered important studies of the meaning of piracy. Comparatively neglected within this work, however, is an explanation of how piracy functioned as an integrating factor in forming the public law of European nations. This paper will explain why the international pirate played a significant role as a figure of negative integration in the Ius Publicum Europaeum. In forming an international community of nations bound by law in the seventeenth century, the pirate as the common enemy of all was a crucial ingredient.

On 30 August 1674, after several months of pursuit, the English Admiralty finally succeeded in capturing George Cusack, one of the most sought and feared pirates in Europe, in the Thames estuary. Soon after, a short treatise was published detailing the arrest of Cusack. In it, he was classified among the most evil kinds of criminal, namely, a pirate and sea robber.

“Think of jihad as an island,” wrote the sixteenth-century Ottoman bureaucrat, historian, and social commentator Mustafa Ali: “On its right is a sea of wealth, on the left is corruption.” Corsairing and piracy, holy war and criminal rebellion – the opposing legal poles of Mediterranean maritime raiding were not distinguished by tactics, equipment, or even personnel, but by targeting and authorization, or its absence. Mustafa Ali argued that many of the holy warrior heroes (gazis, in Ottoman parlance) who had brought North Africa into the Ottoman fold, corsairs like Hayreddin Barbarossa (d. 1546) and Turgud Reis (d. 1565), had begun their careers as petty coastal pirates, preying on Christian and Muslim Ottomans in the Aegean. With time and success, they expanded their operations, improved the size and range of their craft, and only then transitioned to legitimate corsairing in service of the faith and the sultan. By repenting of their earlier sins and devoting themselves to maritime jihad against the enemies of Islam and the Ottoman dynasty, however, these corsairs earned their place in the Ottoman pantheon and their reward in the hereafter.

But, writing just before his death in 1600, Mustafa Ali observed that over the past generation it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the small-time pirates then following similar career paths along the Adriatic and Aegean coasts and the North Africa-bound corsairs they may have aspired to become.

Introduction

Piracy played an important role in the making of the Qing Empire (1636/44–1911). Such a premise at first may appear far-fetched. Not so long ago, China scholars paid little attention to the maritime, dismissing it as peripheral and unimportant. Although today maritime history is one of the hottest topics in Chinese history, few if any scholars would place piracy at centre stage. Indeed, no China scholar has examined the relationship that piracy had with empire building and the legal regime upon which the state rested. Important studies by Janice Thomson, Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Eliga Gould, Lauren Benton, Michael Kempe, and others, although adding greatly to our understandings about the role that piracy has played in the operations of empire and law, nevertheless are Eurocentric in that they focus on Western imperialism and say little about how non-Western imperiums and legal regimes developed or functioned. In this chapter, I shift attention to the construction and internal dynamics of the Qing Empire, sovereignty, and piracy between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Put simply, this chapter takes a China-centred perspective.

This chapter builds on Benton's and other recent studies on European empires, legal regimes, and piracy by exploring how Qing rulers, scholar-officials, agents of foreign states, and pirates interacted with one another in the construction of empire and sovereignty. While my research has been inspired by Benton in particular, I nonetheless take her studies as my point of departure because there is so much that was different in China. She has persuasively argued that the expansion of law closely followed the expansion of European empires across the globe.

Introduction

The image of piracy has largely been shaped by a few early European descriptions, such as Exquemelin's History of the Buccaneers of America (1678) and Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724), which oscillated between the romantic and the abhorrent. These pirates are placed outside of the norms of society, entering an internalized system of modes of behaviour, however violent and turbulent. While less publicized, seaborne raiding in Southeast Asia has also been emblematic in the form of “Malay pirates,” for example via Salgari's novels about Sandokan. Such literary references, and the fact that the Malays were primarily confronted by British ships and therefore found their way into works in English, tends to overshadow other groups active in maritime violence. In fact, acts of seaborne robbery have been known in maritime Southeast Asia since the Middle Ages, and remain an intermittent problem for commercial shipping to this day.

What we conventionally term piracy covers a broad spectrum of activities, from acts condoned or encouraged by states, to robberies outside any legal framework or state interest. Yet, such a broad definition does not help us to understand the complexity of Bugis-Makassarese non-state raiding (“piracy”) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Often, the “criminal” nature of the pursuit is contingent on the perspective; raiders tied to a minor archipelagic ruler in the precolonial era may have claimed political and religious legitimacy, while being regarded as sheer piracy by European authorities.

Piracy should be an ideal subject for world historians. Sea raiding occurred in every region, some piracy spanned interconnected oceans, and anti-piracy campaigns aimed eventually at global prohibition. Still, broad or comparative accounts of piracy in world history have been surprisingly elusive. The problem in part reflects maritime historians’ traditional focus on the study of seaborne trade and navies and the relative neglect of broader political contexts. The study of piracy has helped to produce its own isolation, too, through a persistent attachment to representations of pirates as stateless rogues operating in opposition to forces of regional and global integration.

Piracy in World History helps to move the history of piracy more firmly into the realm of world history. The volume features an expansion of the geographic and chronological contexts of sea raiding and inquires whether finding patterns of “concurrence,” synchronous approaches to piracy in different social arenas and linguistic traditions, can alter well-established Eurocentric accounts. Taken together, the chapters offer some interesting answers, and one goal of my essay is to highlight these insights and to sketch the outlines of ongoing programs for research that come into clear view when the chapters are read together.

The exercise requires first registering some points of critique. I am claiming for the volume a more expansive set of goals and accomplishments than those outlined in the editors’ introduction. Amirell, Buchan, and Hägerdal describe the volume as contributing to the global history of piracy mainly by offering a “conceptual history of piracy” that is global in scope, with an emphasis on “encounters between different concepts.”