Abstract
Histoire des pirates et des corsaires presents a global history of piracy and privateering from Antiquity to the current era. This is, in itself, a tour de force. Edited by Gilbert Buti and Philippe Hroděj, respectively professor of history at Aix-Marseille University and lecturer in history at Bretagne-Sud University, the collection is a complementary sequel to their Dictionnaire des corsaires et des pirates (CNRS Éditions, 2013), as it provides a long-term comparative perspective on the historical forms of maritime depredation that have prevailed and still prevail on the world’s oceans. As the two editors indicate in their Introduction, however, the collection does not aim to provide an exhaustive, let alone definitive, historical account of piracy globally, but rather to offer a pluridisciplinary global outlook on its beginnings and developments across historical time and maritime setting. As such, whoever, expert and neophyte, is looking for a globally-oriented historical synthesis of piracy will be well served with Histoire des pirates et des corsaires.
Comprising 28 chapters, the book is organized both chronologically and geographically. The first part investigates the etymological and historical origins of piracy in the ancient Mediterranean world. It is during the Greek Hellenistic period that denominations of the pirate – lèïstès in Greek, praedo in Latin – first appeared to mean a bandit or, more accurately, a predator seeking loot through maritime private violence, as opposed to state violence, de facto considered legitimate. Law or, rather, absence of law was thus external to the original understanding of piracy in the Antiquity. What defined lèïstès or praedo was instead its relation to legitimate forms of maritime violence, which were monopolized by the state. With the normation of forms of violence in both wartime and peacetime from the middle of fifth century B.C. onward, coinciding with the politicization of maritime spaces by Mediterranean city-states and, against it, the proliferation of maritime plundering, a new terminology of piracy emerged – peïrata in Greek, pirata in Latin– anticipating the modern image of the pirate as the enemy of progress and civilization. Notions of illegality and individuality were gradually introduced in the semantic field of maritime predation, as piracy came to be understood as the structured and organized action of attacking and plundering outside a state of war, and thus outside legitimacy.
The second part of the collection considers piracy in Europe during the Middle Ages. As for the Greek Hellenistic period, the notion of piracy remains difficult to use for the High Middle Ages because neither law nor state authorities were capable of repressing, let alone forbidding, maritime depredation, especially given that those authorities (princes, lords, seigneurs, etc.) were themselves engaged in and profited from it. The classic distinction between ‘official’ privateers and ‘illegal’ pirates is meaningless for this period. Such distinction emerged after the thirteenth century when port rulers began to deliver letters of marque and reprisal to legitimate privately undertaken sea-going retaliation of victims of piracy against the littoral societies of raiders, then regarded by custom as liable in crime. In Mediterranean Muslim societies, similar practices emerged for regulating piratical activities at sea, which came to be included within the religious framework of the jihad.
By the end of the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern era, the extension of sovereign power over oceanic spaces by rising European territorial states included the arrogation of the right to deliver letters of marque and reprisal at sea, consolidating the historical and juridical distinction between state-sanctioned privateers and outlaw pirates as ‘enemies of mankind’. This distinction, however, remained always nebulous in practice, as rulers could covertly authorize, support and even invest in privateering enterprises for imperial aspiration, while publicly condemning it as outright piracy when diplomatic reasons required it, leading to a hybridization of maritime depredation defined as ‘corsopiracy’. The third, fourth and fifth parts of the collection examine this ambiguous boundary between piracy and privateering in both the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds from the sixteenth century up to 1856, when the Paris Declaration of Maritime Law officially abolished privateering as a legitimate weapon of naval warfare. The last part of the collection addresses the renewal of piracy today, from Southeast Asia to Somalia to the Guinea Gulf. Their common denominator lies in that they all take place near fragile or failed states, strategically positioned close to international shipping lanes. Unlike older forms, most of today’s piratical activities at sea are not based on an economy of plunder but of kidnapping and ransom.
For its synthetical scope, and for how it successfully navigates the tenuous and always shifting boundary between piracy and privateering, Histoire des pirates et des corsaires makes an important contribution to maritime history. Interpretatively, however, the collection could have been more in tune with some recent developments in the historiography of piracy, especially that of the so-called ‘golden age’ (1716–1726). For example, Buti and Hroděj still hold the long-held interpretation that A General History of the Pyrates (1724–28)–still a key source on that era – was written by Daniel Defoe under the alias of Captain Charles Johnson, despite the fact that maritime historian Arne Bialuschewski (2004) has provided convincing evidence that, in fact, the book was authored by Nathaniel Mist, a self-taught journalist and former sailor to the Caribbean. This omission, of course, does not discredit Histoire des pirates et des corsaires, but there is a missed opportunity here to revisit A General History anew as a historical document and perhaps develop new interpretations from it. But this shortcoming does not diminish the collection’s greatest strength, namely, to afford readers a global and transhistorical point of view on piracy and privateering, which has as yet no equivalent in other languages.