The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America

By Douglas R. Burgess

The seventeenth-century war on piracy is remembered as a triumph for the English state and her Atlantic colonies. Yet it was piracy and illicit trade that drove a wedge between them, imperiling the American enterprise and bringing the colonies to the verge of rebellion. In The Politics of Piracy, competing criminalities become a lens to examine England’s legal relationship with America. In contrast to the rough, unlettered stereotypes associated with them, pirates and illicit traders moved easily in colonial society, attaining respectability and even political office. The goods they provided became a cornerstone of colonial trade, transforming port cities from barren outposts into rich and extravagant capitals. This transformation reached the political sphere as well, as colonial governors furnished local mariners with privateering commissions, presided over prize courts that validated stolen wares, and fiercely defended their prerogatives as vice-admirals. By the end of the century, the social and political structures erected in the colonies to protect illicit trade came to represent a new and potent force: nothing less than an independent American legal system. Tensions between Crown and colonies presage, and may predestine, the ultimate dissolution of their relationship in 1776. Exhaustively researched and rich with anecdotes about the pirates and their pursuers, The Politics of Piracy will be a fascinating read for scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in the wild and tumultuous world of the Atlantic buccaneers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611686982

Book preview

THE POLITICS OF

PIRACY

CRIME AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Douglas R. Burgess, Jr.

ForeEdge

ForeEdge

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2014 ForeEdge

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England,

One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766;

or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burgess, Douglas R.

The politics of piracy : crime and civil disobedience in colonial America / Douglas R. Burgess Jr.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-527-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61168-698-2 (ebook)

1. Pirates—United States—History. 2. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 3. Piracy—United States—History. 4. Great Britain—Colonies—

America—Administration. I. Title.

E188.B954   2014

973.2—dc23      2014009211

These, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.

ROMANS 2:14

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION || The Sorrowful Tale of Robert Snead

PART I. BEGINNINGS

ONE || London Fog: A Brief, Confusing History of English Piracy Law

TWO || The Phantom Fleet of Porto Principe: Jamaican Privateering under Charles II

THREE || A Spot upon Our Garment: The Red Sea Fever in Colonial New York, 1691–1698

PART II. AN EMPIRE IN CRISIS

FOUR || Voyage of the Fancy, 1696

FIVE || A Tale of Two Trials

SIX || The Ballad of Henry Every: Criminality and Print Culture in the Public Sphere

PART III. PIRATE NESTS

SEVEN || Ignorance of Their Duty: A New Jersey Warning, 1697

EIGHT || A Society of Friends: Quakers and Illicit Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania

NINE || A Bloody Crew of Privateers: Resistance and Right in Rhode Island

PART IV. ROPE’S END

TEN || The Bonds of Slavery: Law, Letters, and the Resumption Bill of 1701–1702

ELEVEN || From Community to Periphery: Trial and Execution in the American Colonies, 1705–1730

CONCLUSION || Forgotten Revolutions

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION

THE SORROWFUL TALE OF ROBERT SNEAD

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1697, customs agent Robert Snead penned a letter to the Board of Trade at Whitehall. The subject was his superior, Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania. Weeks before, the colony had received a proclamation from King William III enjoining all colonists to pursue and apprehend the notorious pirate Henry Every, whose depredations against the Great Mughal posed a serious problem for English trade.

Snead was excited, for he knew that several of Every’s crew were currently residing in Philadelphia. I went at once to the Governor, he wrote the Board, and told him that several of Every’s men were here, well known to him and all persons. He [Markham] said he knew it not. I told him here was enough to prove it, and that if he did not apprehend them I did not know how he could answer it. Markham blandly replied that if seamen brought good solid income to Philadelphia it was not his affair to ask how they got it. He refused to hear the proclamation when I offered to read it to him, but seemed very angry, so I left him.¹

Acting on his own initiative, Snead ordered the pirates arrested. Markham, less amused, ordered their release. The Governor was much displeased with me, Snead reported piously, and called me before his Council and asked what I had against those pirates to hinder their discharge. I told him there was proof enough that they were Every’s men, and had the proclamation read.² When Snead ordered their arrest a second time, Markham’s response was swift. He sent for me, Snead wrote, threatened to send me to jail and dared me to apprehend the pirates, telling me I should not frighten people with my warrant, I had done too much already. He abused me very much and caused my arms [pistols], which I wear for defense against these rogues, to be taken from me.³

Undeterred, Snead committed the pirates back to jail for a third time. He believed he had an ace up his sleeve: a London packet was due any day, carrying an agent from the Board of Trade with express instructions to round up Every’s men throughout the colonies. Snead chose to hold out and play his dangerous game. Finally, in September 1697, the packet arrived. His chronicle becomes a grim record of what happened then:

A gentleman arrived from England and told me that . . . he desired the Governor that the pirates in prison might be better secured, and a guard set over them, and that Every’s men might be sent home in one of the King’s frigates then in Virginia. No guard was set on them, so that the same night two of them got away. He then asked to take the other man in the frigate, but was refused. The gentleman’s name was Robeson, a man of pusillanimous spirit, who was frightened by the Governor.⁴

Snead retired into bitter obscurity. When Surveyor General Edward Randolph arrived some months later, long after Snead’s letter had been received in London, he discovered several of Every’s crew still living openly in the town. One, a ruthless character named Stephen Claus, resided across the street from the governor’s elegant townhouse. Others swaggered about Philadelphia, displaying gold watches and fine imported clothes. Every’s second mate was luckiest of all: his share of the Great Mughal’s treasure had secured the marriage of Governor Markham’s own daughter.⁵

In his letter, Robert Snead was quick to ascribe a single cause for Markham’s conduct: All people see how Arabian gold works with some consciences.⁶ Three centuries later, this is the same explanation commonly given to account for the conduct of men like William Markham of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Fletcher of New York, Thomas Modyford of Jamaica, Samuel Cranston of Rhode Island, and scores of other Atlantic governors whose relationships with the pirates and smugglers threatened English colonial policy.

But is it enough? Like Snead, many historians persist in regarding the pirates and their ilk as a separate and autonomous entity existing apart from and in conflict with colonial governments. Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s depiction of mutinous, disgruntled brigands at war with all the world,⁷ historians’ scholarship supports the argument that the threat of piracy and illegal trade to the English state was negligible but became instead a political tool for the advancement of a neophyte bureaucracy. The threat pirates actually posed to late seventeenth-century trade and empire was vastly overblown by contemporaries, one has written. As a political crisis, however, it was remarkably useful as an excuse to implement further control over the American colonies.⁸

This suggests a monolithic attitude toward the role of the English state and its relationship with the colonies. Just as the state’s terming of pirates as enemies of the human race comes to define them in these accounts, so too does the state’s perspective on the war on piracy. Whether protorevolutionaries or outright criminals, pirates are placed squarely on one side of the social spectrum, the Crown and colonies on the other.⁹ Resistance or obfuscation on the part of the colonies is interpreted as an isolated deviation from the norm.¹⁰

As tempting as this narrative may be, it could not be more wrong. Instead of a pretext for reasserting control over the colonies,¹¹ the politics of piracy represents a severely limited state responding to a crisis beyond its control. Piracy and illegal trade fostered a serious breach between the Crown and colonies in almost every sphere—economic, social, political, and legal. The widespread and long-standing accord between Atlantic pirates, smugglers, merchants, and colonial administrators collided with the mercantilist policies of a new English bureaucracy, leading to a decades-long struggle over criminality, charter rights, trade relations, and the pursuit of English justice in its dominions. The ultimate results of this conflict were twofold: a vastly more intrusive and engaged Crown and, conversely, an independent American legal identity.

Historians have only recently examined the importance of crime in the formation of states.¹² Since the groundbreaking work done by Charles Tilly, a small but growing cadre of scholars has begun considering how the very act of creating law, of classifying certain acts legal and illegal, leaves behind a historical footprint of the mind of the state itself.¹³ This idea first found expression in Michel Foucault’s suggestion that states have no intrinsic essence at all, but rather are merely a collection of mutable practices reflecting changes in power relations.¹⁴

In this view, criminals are as important within the social order as lawmakers, for their status defines the state itself.¹⁵ In the words of one scholar, Bandits helped make states, and the state made bandits.¹⁶ Such was the case of the privateers, whom the English state employed for several centuries before abruptly outlawing them in the seventeenth. Until that time, privateers were military entrepreneurs, assisting the state through sanctioned violence.¹⁷ Yet once the English state gained control over the means of coercion, it renounced the military entrepreneurs and outlawed them. Thus, in a very real way, the creation of piracy law in the early modern period was an expression of state formation.¹⁸ Its application in the Atlantic colonies, likewise, became a test of the English state’s viability. When that application failed—which it did, spectacularly—it raised a host of questions not only about the potency of English governance but about colonial power as well.¹⁹

The burgeoning interest in Atlantic world history has produced a number of scholars engaged in the consideration of the transmission of law and policy from Crown to colony. Elizabeth Mancke provided the parameters of the debate by outlining the effects of empire building on state formation. As empires expanded and began to interact with one another, state policy no longer could be contained within its own borders, but rather had to respond to international pressure both from other states and from an emerging international order. This, Mancke argues, led states with overseas interests to control or suppress privatized violence, including (and especially) piracy. Piracy, as a threat to trade and an infraction of international customary law, posed a grave challenge to the maintenance of amicable relations between empires. Consequently, international pressure, as well as complaints from the East India Company, contributed to a crackdown on piracy spearheaded by the Board of Trade after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697.²⁰

Fifteen years before the publication of Mancke’s article, Robert Ritchie’s authoritative study presented the pirate William Kidd standing on the cusp of widely divergent policies regarding piracy. Ritchie identifies three distinct stages: officially sanctioned privateering typified by Drake and Raleigh (1570–1670), commercial piracy organized by merchants and generally tolerated both by colonists and the Crown (1660–1690), and marauding, the most commonly known form of piracy that Marcus Rediker and others have identified as a war against all the world (1690–1730). The turning point from toleration to extermination came in the mid-1690s with the establishment of the Board of Trade. The English government, Ritchie writes, moved on a broad front to bring order to the empire.²¹ Ritchie posits the case that Kidd’s voyage, lasting from 1696 to 1699, began during one era and ended in another. Between Kidd’s departure from London and his arrival in New York, and notwithstanding his own piratical career, the Board of Trade had been augmented and a vigorous antipiracy policy implemented in the colonies. In his chapter Revenge of the Company, Ritchie offers his own interpretation of the new policy: The roistering buccaneer did not suit the hard-headed merchants and imperial bureaucrats, whose musty world of balance sheets and reports came into violent conflict with that of the pirates.²² The nation-state, increasing in size and complexity, did not need buccaneers anymore. The buccaneers themselves, as Lauren Benton has recently argued, became formidable sea lawyers in their own right, utilizing multiple flags, falsified commissions, and sundry other ruses to remain within the precarious membrane of the law. Benton goes so far as to describe such piratical craft as vectors of law, carrying legal norms with them into foreign climes.²³

The problem of colonial piracy is thus useful for examining the legal relations between Crown and colony because it resides—literally and metaphorically—exactly halfway between the two. As such, it falls into a sort of no-man’s-land between opposing historiographical camps of British political and colonial legal history. The former examines colonial policy from the perspective of its framers: the king, his ministers, and Parliament. The latter examines it from the perspective of the colonists. Thus the debate over the transmission of law from England to the colonies has split regarding the issue of the law’s spiritual center: Is colonial law a creature of Whitehall or of individual colonial assemblies? Does it devolve from the Magna Carta, the colony’s charter, or the individual circumstances of the colonists themselves?²⁴

Since I. K. Steele first laid out the boundaries of Crown policy for the colonies, many historians have followed his example by basing their studies of colonial law on the pattern of decisions emanating from Whitehall and, more specifically, from the factionalism and political maneuvering that influenced such policy.²⁵ Such a center-out narrative is seductive, in that it can be applied to almost anything. For example, Steele credits the failure of the 1701–1702 Resumption Bill to such internecine causes as the impeachment of Whig ministers and the agitation of London Quakers.²⁶ The danger, however, is the tendency to focus so exclusively on English politics that the colonies themselves are practically forgotten. There is evidence that this has occurred. Most historians take it for granted that the end of the seventeenth century marked the beginning of a much more centralized and effective colonial policy.²⁷ They cite as evidence the Navigation Acts of 1696 and the subsequent spate of legislation, all aimed at bringing the recalcitrant colonies back into line. Not long after Steele advanced this argument in 1966, Michael Hall put it even more explicitly: Like the English constitution itself, relationships between colonies and Crown were defined over many years and in divers ways: by royal charter, judicial decision, administrative order, and Act of Parliament. Towards the close of the century this process of definition accelerated. In 1696–1697 the last of the Navigation Acts together with subsequent administrative orders implemented a policy of strict, centralized control.²⁸

The problem with much of this historiography is that it only considers half the equation. While the legislative record is crucial, equally important is how it was received in the colonies. This was precisely the challenge that legal historian Jack Greene embraced. Greene’s argument was a defense of colonial exceptionalism. From the very outset, he wrote, colonies perceived themselves as distinct from the mother country, a fact reflected both in their charters and—most particularly—in their day-to-day administration. Greene posited an imperial constitution, socially and legally distinct from English law, that drew from multiple additional sources: individual colonial circumstances, legal norms brought over from other European states, and the law of nations.²⁹ Colonial charters, Greene argued, were local: they were more reflective of the individual colony than of any overarching legal structure.³⁰

Two diametrically opposed views thus developed, which might be termed center and periphery theories of colonial legal relations. Those following I. K. Steele regard the process of governance as emanating from London down to the various colonies through acts of the king and his ministers, as well as Parliament. Others, following Jack Greene’s model, see the opposite: an organic aggregation of customs, rights, liberties, and common usages that coalesced into individual legal identities for each of the colonies and were often at variance with Crown law.³¹ While it is facile to declare that both arguments have merit and then move on, one undeniable benefit of the dispute is that it reveals just how tenuous and fluid a concept colonial legality has proved to be.³²

If both historians share any fault, it is that they both regard the transmission of law as a transatlantic phenomenon whose progression is primarily, if not exclusively, westward. For Steele this amounts to the cornerstone of his argument: that English law was not only transmitted to the colonies intact but was so deeply entrenched in colonial legal structures that the colonies emulated Parliament of their own accord. Greene, while taking a very different view of the success of the law’s migration, nevertheless accepts the basic premise that underlies it. While he asserts the independent nature of the colonies as evidence of the negotiated legal relationship with England, he still assumes that the negotiation went on entirely on American soil. In other words, neither historian seriously considers the possibility that the law might also have moved eastward, that the legal structures of the colonies might have influenced—even altered—English law and policy regarding them.

Yet if piracy and illegal trade are such a useful lens for examining this legal dialogue, why have they been largely ignored? It was not always so. In the seventeenth century, their centrality within the Crown’s consciousness is illustrated by the vehemence with which successive monarchs attempted to stamp them out. Piracy in the Caribbean threatened Charles II’s relations with Spain at a time when the Crown purse was unable to finance a war. Several decades later, pirates sailing from American and Caribbean ports, especially the flamboyant Henry Every, nearly brought the East India trade to a standstill. Piracy presented the Crown with a formidable challenge in its ongoing attempts to foster an empire, one that was all the more pernicious as it came from within the framework of the empire itself: English subjects, often bearing commissions granted them by Crown-appointed governors, wrought havoc on one area of English trade (the Indies) to the direct benefit of another (the Atlantic colonies). While not civil war, piracy was certainly a nascent form of rebellion—not against the Crown directly but against the Navigation Acts and other policies that were injurious to the colonists. Sometimes considered a criminal conspiracy, it is more properly understood as an alliance—a local, sometimes familial, and profoundly colonial one between pirates, illegal traders, merchants, and administrators. Nor should these individuals be considered separate from one another. On the contrary, there was a fluidity between them, wherein both successful merchants and even the odd colonial governor might outfit a ship and turn pirate themselves. Pirates and smugglers threaded easily through the fabric of colonial society, fostering relationships that challenged the very concept of criminality in the Atlantic world.

The task of this study will be to reconstruct that relationship and illustrate how it operated over time. This is a delicate business. The Crown’s side of the tale is better documented: passed down through trial records, pamphlet literature, royal proclamations, and the much-discussed antipiracy policies of the Board of Trade. The other side, that of colonial law and custom, is as much inferred as it is written. Rarely did colonial administrators openly flout the Crown. Instead, most trod a careful line between apparent subservience and tacit noncompliance. Consequently, we must attempt to reassemble a narrative thread from both Crown/colonial correspondence and internal communications within the colonies. Fortunately, with a little judicious digging, the colonial record reveals an extraordinarily complete account of attempts by successive administrations to safeguard privateering, which they viewed as not only an essential element of colonial commerce but a defensible prerogative of the governor himself.

While it is tempting to accuse these ambitious administrators of overreach—even insubordination—the true culprit was England herself. The challenge of piracy grew out of conflicts and confusion within English law, providing early colonial governors with the opportunity to appropriate admiralty jurisdiction and define the crime of piracy ad hoc. With English courts divided on issues of jurisdiction and definition, as well as a long history of Crown sponsorship that terminated only in the eighteenth century, these governors had ample precedent from which to fashion their own policy. Piracy, then, amounted to a structural flaw within the colonial plan, transposed from the English to the colonial context like vermin that arrive with the first settlers and flourish in their new environment.

When the Crown belatedly attempted to curb the granting of privateering commissions later in the seventeenth century, the practice had become so entrenched within the colonial legal structure that to abandon it amounted to surrendering legal prerogative. Thus the crimes of piracy and illegal trade became intricately woven within both the legal and political structure of the colonies. This manifested itself in different forms. In New York, accusations of pirate brokering were used as leverage by disenfranchised Whigs to remove an unpopular Tory governor, Benjamin Fletcher. Conversely, in Rhode Island, the Crown’s attempts to quash piracy were regarded as an attack on the sovereign rights of the charter. Even the uproar leading to the failed Resumption Bill of 1701–1702—which would have placed all of English America under martial law—owes much to a growing awareness at Whitehall of pirate brokering in the colonies. While the circumstances differ, a common thread connects all these incidents: piracy in the late seventeenth century became a fixing point for the airing of political conflicts. This was true not only of conventional factions—Tory versus Whig—but also of more personal feuds, such as that between Governor Dudley of Massachusetts and Governor Cranston of Rhode Island.

Most critical, however, was the ever-widening legal schism between Crown and colonies. From the time of Charles II, the English government was aware that some of its colonial administrators were deliberately flouting Crown policy, continuing to grant privateering commissions and convene prize courts despite express instructions to the contrary. Yet it was powerless to stop them. From the revelations of the Every trials in 1696 until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the English government tried every means available to it to restrain the pirates, from threats of retribution to promises of pardon. It made public examples of men like William Kidd and Henry Every (in absentia), as well as an isolated handful of governors, including Benjamin Fletcher, Nicholas Trott, and William Markham. It sent Edward Randolph to the colonies to collect evidence of pirate sponsorship and dispatched Richard Coote, First Lord Bellomont, with instructions to take whatever measures he deemed necessary to stamp out piracy and bring the New England colonies back into line.

Yet each of these measures only reaffirmed the essential futility of the Crown’s efforts. It failed even within the comparatively limited realm of the public sphere, as the Henry Every trials illustrate. This collective failure suggests that we must reconsider the concept of negotiated authority in colonial society. On many issues, England and her colonies were of the same mind, which is duly reflected in their laws. But when considering the legal structure of the Atlantic colonies, the critical question is not of points of agreement but of dissonance, which leads to the crucial question: How central were piracy and illegal trade to Crown and colony in this era?

Based on the evidence of legislation and correspondence, they were pivotal. For the Crown, piracy not only represented a threat to its trade and foreign policy but to the very foundations of its colonial system. If we accept Michel Foucault’s assertion that law is the articulation of state power, then surely the creation of an alternate law—an opposing law—is tantamount to a refutation of that power. For the colonies, most particularly the charter colonies, the inverse was true: attempts by the Crown to restrain the pirate trade were widely regarded as a ploy to reinstate the chains of bondage on the people. Any encroachment on the rights and liberties of the charter governments was suspect, even when (as English jurists repeatedly maintained) those particular liberties had never belonged to them. Ultimately it would not matter whether the early governors had improperly exercised admiralty jurisdiction or properly inferred it from their commissions: either way, half a century later the rights had been assumed.

While piracy receded from the Atlantic consciousness, the fissures it revealed between English and colonial law remained. The conflict over piracy can thus be seen not only as framing the political struggles of the seventeenth century but also as foreshadowing those of the eighteenth, culminating with ultimate dissolution in 1776. Consider these words, written that year by Thomas Paine: To be always running three or four thousand miles with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which when obtained requires five or six more to explain it, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness.³³

Paine is describing a legal relationship—or, as Foucault would argue, a power relationship. The viability of the state is only as great as its ability to communicate with its subjects and impress its will upon them. If it cannot do so, the subjects themselves erect laws to fill in the vacuum. This is precisely what occurred in the American colonies, resulting in vastly different criminalities. Yet the collision between these two legal models, Crown and colony, did not take until 1776. In fact, it was built into the very system that bound them, flaring into open breach in 1665, 1688, 1697, and 1701 and in scores of other instances. The catalyst, time and again, was piracy. This dusty and seemingly anachronistic crime ultimately came to define relations between England and her American colonies. It is a story of greed, certainly, but also of patriotism, loyalty, and even friendship.

It is a story that has never fully been told, until now.

PART I

BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON FOG

A Brief, Confusing History of English Piracy Law

TO SPEAK OF the law in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic colonies is to open an enormous can of worms. Whose law do we speak of? How was it articulated? How was it enforced? These questions are critical, for they are the very essence of the state itself. It was through the law that England maintained dominion over its colonial possessions. English identity was defined in no small part by existence within the juridical boundaries of the Crown; ¹ in theory, the common law was indeed common to all, colonists and Englishmen alike. ²

The law, however, assumed a drastically different character when transmitted across the Atlantic. It lacked the immediacy of its English counterpart: the intricate system of justices and sheriffs, of itinerant courts and magistrates, all tasked with communicating the king’s law to his subjects and ensuring their compliance. In the Atlantic colonies this duty was vested in a single man, the colonial governor.³ While local assemblies had some jurisdiction over matters within the colony, governors were the conduits through which all Crown law passed. Given this, and the vast distance between the colonies and their mother country, it is not surprising to find heterogeneity among the colonial legal systems.⁴

In the formative years of the mid-seventeenth century, the English state lacked both the will and the ability to oversee its colonies; not until near the end of the century would a professional bureaucracy be established for colonial matters. Until then, and even after, the business of receiving and implanting the law belonged to the colonial governor. This was no sinecure; governors were de facto potentates, tasked with maintaining order, encouraging trade and settlement, keeping the peace with colonial neighbors, and—most importantly—safeguarding their colony from attack.⁵ The success of the colony lay in their hands. The king and his ministers understood the enormity of this task and vested these individuals with an enormous amount of personal prerogative. As late as 1746, the Lords of the Admiralty still maintained that they could not interfere with the depredations by colonial privateers in America and the West Indies, as the governors alone have power to curb [their] insolencies.⁶

This prerogative rested on the recognition of the Crown’s limitations and of the existence of circumstances in the colonies that often mooted its law and counsel. Colonies were beyond the pale of the law, distant outposts where wars and skirmishes often continued long after their conclusion on the European continent.⁷ The perception of perpetual violence arose not only from external threats but from the manner of colonization itself.⁸ In most territories in the Atlantic world, English colonies displaced native or preexisting populations.⁹ In Jamaica, for example, the English obtained the colony from its Spanish occupants by conquest in 1655, fostering an enmity between the two that made the threat of reconquest a constant worry for English administrators.¹⁰

Amid this highly charged political climate, there is nothing original in highlighting the fact that certain governors protected pirates or turned a blind eye to illegal trade. The relations discussed in subsequent chapters between the pirate Henry Morgan and Governor Modyford of Jamaica, or Thomas Tew and Governor Fletcher of New York, are well documented, yet few have taken up the task of placing these relationships within a legal context.¹¹ Nearly every historian of piracy, having examined the same set of documents in the state papers, reached the same conclusion as the Lords of Trade in 1696: governors that sponsored pirates were venal and corrupt, profiting from a practice that weakened the English state.¹² This conclusion fails to consider how the governors themselves regarded the practice. When evaluating the role of piracy in colonial legal structures, the first and most salient question must be: Did colonial administrators themselves regard it as illegal?

Instantly, we are in the weeds. English law on piracy was vague, contradictory, and cripplingly divided, first over definition and second over jurisdiction. As a civil law crime tried by common-law courts, confusion was inevitable. Customary law provided the seemingly inflexible definition of pirates as traitors and enemies of the state, yet justices repeatedly termed them sea-robbers, no different from highwaymen. These were two very different kinds of criminal. To confuse matters still further, statute law granted the sovereign unlimited prerogative to extend or contract the meaning of piracy to include almost any dubious act undertaken at sea. Jurisdictional wrangling deepened the divide: common-law courts often were reluctant to convict men who were their friends and neighbors (a phenomenon that reappears in the colonial context), while successive kings sought to remove piracy trials from this sympathetic atmosphere and place them instead under admiralty jurisdiction, an extension of the Crown.

The irony is that among all crimes, piracy has one of the oldest and most established legal pedigrees. Sir Edward Coke, in his Institutes, cites a Roman precept coined by Marcus Tullius Cicero at the height of the Republic. Pirates, Coke writes, were defined by Cicero as hostis humani generi, enemies of the human race.¹³ The threat of piracy came from its implied challenge to the laws and trade of the state: pirates removed themselves from the state’s jurisdiction, formed extraterritorial enclaves, and waged private war for pecuniary ends.¹⁴ Hence one could not speak of them merely as ordinary

Reviews for The Politics of Piracy

[waltzmn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Where do pirates hide their gold? No, it isn't on some island where X marks the spot. Instead, it was in the American colonies before the American Revolution.This isn't really news. The reason the famous Captain Kidd was hanged was because he thought he was going to be a privateer (that is, a private ship carrying letters saying he was authorized to fight ships of other nations), but while he was on his voyage, the attitude of the British government changed. This was because of an outrage committed by one Henry Every or Avery against Indian ships. The British realized that they had to get this sort of anarchy under control, and set out strengthen their control over British ships. Kidd thought he was a privateer; the government thought he was a pirate -- and, under the new rules, he was. And he paid.This book goes beyond that. It opens with an account of Every's crime, then details the British government's attempt to bring Every to book. It never found him, but several of his sailors were caught and, after being acquitted by one British jury, convicted and hung under following another trial that should not have been permitted because it was essentially double jeopardy.But why did Every escape? Mostly because the American colonies were encouraging privateers who preyed on other nations, on other colonies, on anyone but ships of their own colonies. They were, frankly, pirates, but to each colony, they were "our pirates." So the colonies wanted to keep them. And the British government did not. Increasingly, the British turned the screws on the colonists to get the piracy to stop.This was not, of course, the only source of friction between the colonies and the British government in the eighteenth century. You've heard of all the others that arose in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War/French and Indian War -- the Stamp Act and all of those. Author Burgess argues that the issue of piracy was already shaping a conflict that turned hot in 1775. This is a new idea, at least to me; I don't know how well it will stand up, but it is provocative.The book is not a perfect read; the section on the Every trial is gripping, but once it got into colonial politics, I found myself rather lost in all the names of colonial officials. But in general it is clear, and it makes a strong argument for a position that surely deserves more attention than it has received.

[paulberauer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting (academically-bent) history of piracy and the connection it had to colonial governments. While Burgess tells a fascinating story, the book gets bogged down at times by the sheer number of colonial figures he refers to. The book also suffers from Burgess' need to emphasis how his approach is different (and better) than traditional takes on piracy. He also takes the odd potshot at various historians, which adds nothing to the argument, and makes him seem petty. Overall a good introduction to how piracy and colonial governments, but probably a little too academic for the casual reader.

[melannen_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Politics of Piracy makes the case that in the years around the 1690s, the governors of Britain's North American colonies aided and supported piracy in the Red Sea, and that the efforts of authorities in Britain, represented by the Board of Trade, to curb or control this support were essentially useless until changing conditions made the governors withdraw their support on their own terms.While obviously coming from within the academic writing community, it's clearly and cogently written, and makes good use of primary sources - especially the trans-Atlantic correspondence between colonial governors and agents, and British authorities such as the Board of Trade. Through the vehicle of looking at piracy law, it creates an excellent glimpse of what governance was actually like in the first century of the British colonies, when connections with Britain were sometimes tenuous, the population was small enough that nearly everyone knew of nearly everyone, and nothing was quite established yet. I was especially tickled by the story of the time the mother country asked Rhode Island to please send a copy of its laws, and then wrote back six months later to say, okay, please send a copy where the handwriting is legible. However, for a book that's ostensibly about piracy, the pirates themselves make very few appearances in this book, and only around the edges. The only pirate whose story is given any substantial discussion is Henry Every; other pirates are mentioned in passing as if the reader is expected to already be intimately familiar with their histories (Tew, Kidd) or simply as lists of names that came up in governmental correspondence. There is little to no discussion of the pirates' own politics - not to mention their motivations for seeking piracy, their economic roles, their numbers and demographic, or, with the notable exception of Every, what their pirating actually involved. The pirates, in Burgess's account, come off as simply blank pawns in a game between the governors and the Board of Trade. This lack of pirates doesn't just make the book something of a disappointment for anyone who comes to it out of an interest in 17th/18th century piracy, it also serves to weaken the book's main argument.This becomes especially apparent in the book's final chapter, when he moves beyond establishing the state of affairs in the 1690s - when the colonial governors gave open-ended, dubiously legal 'privateering' commissions to local shipowners, so that they could sail to the Indian Ocean and bring income back to the colonies - to the 1710s and 20s, when the governors began turning against piracy because of a shift in how the pirates affected their colonies. With so little context for piracy in general, for why the trade moved out of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea (or indeed, why it went there in the first place), or even any real discussion of how the pirates' money and presence benefited the colonies during the period when they were supported there, it's hard to buy any of his arguments once he leaves the limited milieu of the wrangling for control between the Governors and the Board of Trade over Indian Ocean piracy.In fact, I suspect there's a stronger (and more interesting) argument to be made that the situation in the 1690s, and the specific trade of established British captains sailing to India under North American privateering commissions, is an exceptional case. It may even be that while that specific trade was important to the North American colonies, and certainly led to the most spectacular prizes, it may not even have been relevant to the majority of pirates at the time. Certainly there is nothing in Burgess' book to present evidence either way, and iirc from the last time I read in the academia of piracy (about ten years ago, admittedly), local coastal piracy in my home colony proceeded pretty much undaunted from the late 17th century until the rise of steam.The absolutely exclusive focus on a small group of upper-class white British men (with bit parts to the feebly annoyed Great Mughal and his poor, tragically violated beautiful daughter, oh, and some revolting natives that got one line) began to grate after awhile as well, especially as the history of British policies in India loomed larger and larger over events, and yet was granted no voice at all in events. I guess I've just gotten used to histories that occasionally acknowledge people other than upper-class white British men as actors.I'm sure part of this is the result of the realities of academic history (which I end up complaining about every time I read a book like this): that following all the context leads to an endless web of research; and that one can only write about primary sources where the primary sources exist. That said, in this particular book Burgess would probably have been better off sticking to that very specific context of the Governors and the Board of Trade, and not trying to use that to speak about the roles of pirates more generally.Tl;dr: it's an interesting and well-written book about politics in the American colonies in the late 17th century, and covers ground that very few other histories discuss; it doesn't really say much about the pirates themselves; more context would have been really nice even to someone who's got some background in parts of the history; I wish this had instead been a book about how Indian Ocean piracy in the late 17th/early 18th century involved political and economic interactions between the American colonies and the Mughal empire as mediated by British trade policy, because I bet that's a way more important story.

[camelama_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this book educational, an interesting read, and also so frustrating. I was happy to learn more about the intricacies of political involvement in Piracy, and reactions to such, etc. But I felt like the book needed more pirates! A few more actual pirates being used as examples, or to illustrate a point, would have been quite welcome. I don't need legends and myths, but actual piratical involvement would have been nice in this text. It was easy to read, and easy to get lost in - I did enjoy reading what was there. I felt like this author had a bit of a chip on the shoulder, with some of the comments about other pirate histories and such. It's definitely worth reading for the history, opinions & theories. And it left me wanting to learn more about the politics of the time, which is a huge thing - I hate politics! A good read, not sure if I'd buy it, but I would for sure put a hold on it at the library!

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A different perspective on Atlantic piracy during the late seventeenth century than we tend to get from Marcus Rediker and others. Burgess focuses on the legal and political squabbles over piracy which set colonial and crown officials at loggerheads, while also emphasizing the key differences between colonial administrations on these questions. He makes clear just how close some colonial leaders were to certain well-known pirates and their associates, and argues that the key disagreements over interpretation of piracy laws can be seen as precursors to the constitutional struggles which eventually doomed England's hold over her North American colonies.Pretty dense, and probably not for the casual reader, but a very good addition to the literature.

[avogt221-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For those of you looking for a pulpy tale of pirates and daring do, you may want to look elsewhere. This book takes a slightly more academic approach to piracy and the development of colonial governments. Because of this approach there are a lot of names which I had not previously been familiar with. So at times it was a little hard to keep track of the personalities involved. Nevertheless, it is quite readable if you come to it with the understanding that it isn't a straight popular history. Overall, a very interesting look at a fascinating period of history.

[empress8411 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having an interest in both pirates and colonial America, I was eager to read this. It did not disappoint. Burgess makes a strong argument for his case: that piracy during the late 1690s was the source of the first civil disobedience on the part of colonies. His writing is clearly meant for the education and the academic. The sentences structure, syntax, and vocabulary of the prose are complex. He cites sources from across academia, demonstrating extensive research. For the casual reader, this book might be a bit wordy. However, if you enjoy intellectual works, this book is for you. Note: I received this book free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program, in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.