Abstract
Political scientists see modern piracy as a symptom of failed states – when a state government fails to make its presence (and its laws) felt in markets, ports and territorial waters, criminals step in to fill that governmental vacuum, and piracy and smuggling thus flourish. The study of Atlantic piracy came into being with this assumption as its governing framework. Leading scholars in the field thus hold that pirates prospered and multiplied in the Atlantic during piracy's ‘golden age’ because imperial governments did not police Atlantic waters and ports. Pirates were indeed a mild irritant to these imperial governments in times of peace, but they were also useful third-party weapons against imperial rivals and, in times of war, they were valuable allies and mercenaries. According to this reigning storyline, Atlantic piracy ended violently and abruptly when the British Empire decided to change course and exert its will and authority in the British Atlantic. It used the Royal Navy, the customs service and the courts to conduct an intense but short ‘war on piracy’ from the 1690s to the 1720s – pursuing, prosecuting and executing pirates on a massive scale. Britain pacified the Atlantic by terrorizing multitudes of pirates either to abandon their life of crime or to abandon the Atlantic (that is, relocate to the Indian Ocean).
For David Wilson, by contrast, Britain did not conduct a ‘war on piracy’. Piracy was indeed suppressed in short order through a combination of violence, intimidation, prosecution and harassment, but the British state (the Crown, Parliament and the Admiralty) was not the central player in the story of the suppression of piracy. Instead, it was local communities in Britain's New World colonies (especially maritime merchants, investors and shipowners) that initiated and effected this law-enforcement campaign. What drove and shaped the suppression of piracy in the Atlantic were local conditions and complaints, as well as local enforcement, rather than imperial policy.
The result was a scattered, disjointed and haphazard series of local efforts to harass, delegitimize, prosecute, attack and chase pirates, and bar them from various colonial markets and ports. And yet, Wilson's narrative does present a pattern. His first three chapters guide readers through anti-piracy agitation and activism in Britain's Caribbean colonies during the 1710s and 1720s. Three additional chapters cover similar – and simultaneous – agitation on the part of British merchants in North America, West Africa and the Indian Ocean. Thus, while Wilson rejects the notion of a ‘war on piracy’, his own account tells an even more impressive tale of piracy suppression. Whereas the established storyline claims that Britain transformed the Atlantic from a lawless frontier into a well-regulated venue of legitimate commerce in a single generation (1690s–1720s), Wilson's narrative suggests such a transformation in a single decade (1716–1726).
Scholars who tie the demise of piracy to ‘the rise of the British state’ (among them Marcus Rediker, Robert Ritchie, Kris Lane, Janice Thomson and Mark Hanna) will doubtless challenge Wilson's thesis by pointing out that colonial governors, prosecutors and courts (especially Admiralty courts) should be counted as enforcement agencies of the state, not the localities. Where Wilson sees local initiative and action, they see an energized British state – customs agents, naval officers, governors, prosecutors and judges – willing and able to police local markets, ports and waters in response to local merchants’ concerns and complaints.
That said, Wilson's study tracks a growing scepticism in the field with the notion of naval suppression. While early studies of piracy credited the demise of Atlantic piracy to the Royal Navy, more recent studies have been sceptical of the capabilities of the Navy. Not only do naval historians indicate that eighteenth-century navies were incapable of the kind of naval suppression suggested by early piracy scholars, but the sources provided by more recent studies (including Wilson's) also indicate that most of the suppression – such as it was – took place at port, on land, rather than at sea. Thus, Wilson will likely find much support for his contention that piracy suppression and policing of trade took place mostly at port, extending itself to the sea only over time.
In this respect, Wilson's study actually complements, rather than challenges, those early studies on the rise and fall of Atlantic piracy. By focusing on the local circumstances and experience of life and of trade in the British Empire, Wilson provides a much-needed counterbalance to previous piracy studies, which place the imperial metropole at the heart of the narrative on the economy, trade, regulation and law enforcement (including piracy suppression). Wilson's corrective brings this state-centric narrative into harmony with the works of imperial and colonial historians such as James Henretta, Jack Greene, Bernard Bailyn, John Phillip Reid and Linda Colley, who paint a picture of a peculiar empire, in which the centre of gravity was the peripheries, not the metropole.
Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century will therefore sit comfortably on the shelf alongside the leading piracy studies that Wilson challenges. While they disagree on details (such as the duration of the suppression campaign, which enforcement agency deserves credit for it, and the proper balance between peripheries and centre), they all see the demise of Atlantic piracy primarily as a British story, and as an abrupt and violent event. While Wilson is critical of his predecessors’ state-centric perspective, he nevertheless shares their acceptance of the distinction made by metropolitan governments between piracy and privateering as both meaningful and credible. The more fundamental criticism of Wilson will therefore come not from the scholars he critiques, but from the small cohort of piracy scholars who reject the framework within which Wilson writes. These scholars (myself among them) argue that British piracy-suppression efforts failed; that piracy disappeared from the Atlantic not abruptly but gradually, not violently but peacefully (due to changing economic incentives), and not in the early eighteenth century but in the mid nineteenth century.
Wilson should be congratulated for telling the story of the ‘war on piracy’ from the local, rather than metropolitan, perspective. He points the way for future scholarship by demonstrating the value of connecting this subfield with the much larger body of imperial and colonial histories, which have long highlighted the localism of the First British Empire. Likewise, the publisher should be congratulated for offering footnotes, rather than endnotes, as well as a complete bibliography and two appendices (the second of which – British naval assignments – is particularly helpful).