The jurisdictional complexity and layered sovereignty of empires converted struggles over rights – their definition, deployment, and distribution – into contests over authority. This chapter examines the close relationship between authority and rights, together with the emergence of variegated rights regimes, in the British, Spanish, and Russian empires. All three empires relied on long-standing routines for assigning different sets of rights to different categories of subjects. This approach to the history of rights is different from the familiar focus on the circulation of ideas about natural or universal rights. The chapter examines the politics of rights in relation to imperial claims of protection over various groups and in coerced labor regimes. It then turns to the question of how conflicts over rights inside empires influenced global stratification. The right to be sovereign – the right to give rights, to order them, and to protect them – emerged in the long nineteenth century as a capacity possessed and decided by European imperial powers.

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.”

As composite polities, empires were plural legal orders. Conquest, settlement, and rule depended on elaborate arrangements to manage the relation of imperial law to local or indigenous law. Calls for impartial justice in empires emerged in the context of intricate legal conflicts over order and rights, with varied institutional trajectories as the result. The rule of law in empires must be approached as part of the history of legal politics in fluid, fragmented systems of law.