Challenging empires: pirates, privateers and the Europeanisation of ocean spaces (c. 1500-1650) (original) (raw)
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2014
"ABSTRACT ATLANTIC PIRATES: THE PAWNS OF RIVALRY IN THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM, 1650-1713 Alptekin, Onur M. Sc., Department of Latin and North American Studies Middle East Technical University Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Sheila Pelizzon January 2014, 179 pages This thesis is a survey through a specific relation of two continents, namely Latin America and Europe between 1650 and 1713. This specific relation was piratical activities that European countries conducted in the trade routes in Atlantic Ocean. Yet, in this study, piracy in these trade routes is not perceived as just a criminal activity, but a paramilitary tool used by European states in a rivalry for control over the Atlantic trade routes. "
The author questions the widespread idea that piracy is a hindrance to maritime communication. He shows that piracy can reinforce connectivity, as defined by Horden and Purcell, by provoking human displacements and increasing ethnic diversity. The repression of piracy is carried out by means of the law, by the creation of institutions such as maritime insurance, or by diplomacy. The author examines the links between political power and piracy, especially in the case of thalassocracies. Résumé. L'auteur s'interroge sur l'idée généralement répandue que la piraterie est une entrave à la communication maritime. Il montre que la piraterie peut renforcer la connectivité, au sens de Horden et Purcell, en provoquant des déplacements humains et en accroissant la diversité ethnique. La répression de la piraterie s'effectue par la loi, par la création d'institutions comme l'assurance maritime, ou par la diplomatie. L'auteur s'interroge enfin sur les liens entre le pouvoir politique et la piraterie, surtout dans le cas des thalassocraties. • • •
Privateering, Colonialism and Empires On the Forgotten Origins of International Order
The Historicity of International Politics, 2023
This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.
Journal of World-Systems Research, 2016
This article uses world-systems analysis to examine the role that pirates and privateers played in the competition between European core states in the Atlantic and Caribbean frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Piracy was an integral part of core-periphery interaction, as a force that nations could use against one another in the form of privateers, and as a reaction against increasing constraints on freedom of action by those same states, thus forming a semiperiphery. Although modern portrayals of pirates and privateers paint a distinct line between the two groups, historical records indicate that their actual status was rather fluid, with particular people moving back and forth between the two. As a result, the individuals were on a margin between legality and treason, often crossing from one to the other. In this study we discuss how pirates and privateers fit into the margins of society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also known as the Golden Age...
«The Silver Age of Piracy»: French pirates in the Atlantic in the first third of the XVI century
Samara Journal of Science, 2020
The purpose of the study was to find a causal relationship between the activities of king Francis I and the large-scale pirate actions of the captains of the French merchant fleet, Jean Ango. This was necessary to show piracy as a fusion of the military and diplomatic policies of France against Portugal and Spain with the naval experience of warfare on the seas and in the oceans, which had the captains of the merchant fleet of Jean Ango. We can see this connection by the captured and looted of hundreds of ships in Portugal and Spain with the full support of piracy from the French crown. The goal was also to show how France, through piracy and its promotion at the state level, destroyed the system of international agreements and Royal oaths in the Christian world for the sake of its commercial advantage. The author studies and gives examples of numerous acts of piracy, numbering in the hundreds of captured, robbed, and sunk ships, the reasons and conclusions are given why Francis I b...
2021
In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of ‘legal posturing’ on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in Piracy in World History highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.