Piracy Law as Propaganda: Piracy Suppression at the Center & Periphery of the British Atlantic

Modern accounts of Atlantic piracy depict the Royal Navy as an effective police force that, in the course of a generation (1697-1730), transformed the Atlantic from a violent frontier into a locus of orderly commerce. Scholars who see a sharp decline in piracy in the early-18th century argue that a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion produced a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy. A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the 19th century, with Britons persisting in seeing “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate despite imperial attempts to effect change.

As early-modern European states were centralizing their bureaucracies, establishing ideologies of state and law, modernizing their finances, and enacting bureaucratic and commercial monopolies as tools of state building, seas and oceans experienced a different course of development. As national mercantilist economies emerged in Europe, oceans formed trans-imperial trade zones, which operated as free-trade zones, given that legal trade restrictions were easily and routinely violated. The vastness of the ocean allowed British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to retain an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and to resist legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building.

The distance between imperial law and commercial practice corresponded to the distance between the seats of government and the myriad locations of Atlantic commercial activities. Governments’ efforts to bridge this ethical gap inevitably involved attempts to bridge the geographical gap as well, enhancing the presence and role of state agents in local jurisdictions and at sea. In this sense, statutory law was a form of propaganda regarding the reach of state authority – a proclamation of national governments’ policy aspirations, as well as their presumptions to jurisdiction and administrative sway in peripheral communities. Such propaganda remained unconvincing under governments that demonstrated to constituents that they did not have the capacity to enforce the law.