Pirates, privateers and the political economy of private violence

Global Change, Peace and Security

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 139-152

  Mabee, Bryan ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Historical sociology; Piracy; Political economy; Private violence; Privateering

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950777255     PISSN: 14781158     EISSN: 14781166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14781150902871994     Document Type: Article

References (126)

1. Paul Collier, 'Doing Well Out of War: An Economic Perspective', in Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed. Mats Berdal (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 91-111
2. M.L. Ross, 'Oil, Drugs, and Diamonds: The Varying Roles of Natural Resources in Civil War', in The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, ed. Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 47-70.
3. Deborah Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
4. P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
5. William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004).
6. Roger Middelton, 'Piracy in Somalia: Threatening Global Trade, Feeding Local Wars', Chatham House Briefing Paper (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2008).
7. Martin M. Murphy, Contemporary Piracy and Maritime Terrorism: The Threat to International Security, Adelphi Paper 388 (London: Routledge, 2008).
8. Puchala provides one interesting take on this, examining historical piracy, and especially the war on piracy, to make contemporary comparisons with the 'war on terror
9. Donald J. Puchala, 'Of Pirates and Terrorists: What Experience and History Teach', Contemporary Security Policy 26, no. 1 (2005): 1-24.
10. Thanks to Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira for these distinctions. Owens has further discussed the conceptual problems surrounding 'private' and 'public' in the case of current issues about the privatisation of violence.
11. Patricia Owens, 'Distinctions, Distinctions: "Public" and "Private" Force?', International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008): 977-90.
12. Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
13. Following Tilly, 'national state' is used to refer to the generic form of state developing in Europe, whereas 'nationstate' is more specific to states with homogenous nationalities within them (or the consequence of a nationalising process).
14. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 900-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
15. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979).
16. Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: UCL Press, 1999), chap. 1.
17. Charles Tilly, 'War Making and State Making as Organized Crime', in Bringing the State Back In, ed. P.B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 172.
18. Lauren Benton, 'Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism', Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 4 (2005): 706-21.
19. Benton, 'Legal Spaces', 724.
20. Works such as Thomson's dramatically overstate the importance of a monopoly of violence in the definition of the state, and unsurprisingly neo-Weberians such as Mann have importantly excluded the monopolisation of legitimate violence from their definitions of the state.
21. Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
22. Furthermore, the focus on monopolisation misses other forms of the transnational constitution and organisation of force, through imperial power, through client-states and forms of internationalisation.
23. Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
24. Ellen Meiksins Wood, 'The Separation of the "Economic" and the "Political" in Capitalism', in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19-48.
25. Benno Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System of State: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism', European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 1 (2002): 5-48.
26. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994).
27. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
28. The account given here sees capitalism as the development of a particular mode of social relations, in line with most historical materialist/Marxist accounts. However, there is no necessary assumption that 'mode of production' provides the key logic to social and political change. Though there is insufficient space to detail all of the various debates about the state-building process and its relationship to capitalism (or industrialism) and violence, the position taken here is more in line with Giddens' quasi-Marxist explanation of the development of absolutist states into national-states.
29. Michael Mann, 'The Sources of Social Power Revisited', in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, ed. John A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 343-96.
30. Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System'.
31. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society.
32. Robert Brenner, 'From Theory to History: "The European Dynamic" or Feudalism to Capitalism?', in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, ed. John A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189-232.
33. Geoffrey Symcox, 'Introduction', in War, Diplomacy, and Imperialism: 1618-1763, ed. Geoffrey Symcox (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 2.
34. Brenner, 'From Theory to History'.
35. Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System'.
36. Brenner, 'From Theory to History'.
37. Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System'.
38. Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System', 13.
39. Teschke, 'Theorizing the Westphalian System', 8.
40. The East India Company provides an exemplary example of this fusion of interest. See the accounts in
41. N. Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto, 2006)
42. Phillip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1993).
43. M.N. Pearson, 'Merchants and States' in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41-116.
44. Anne Perotin-Dumon, 'The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450-1850', in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, ed. C.R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 29.
45. Thomson, Mercenaries, 4.
46. And only a final note on the second revolution of the eighteenth century: the democratic revolutions in France and the United States, and the advent of citizenship rights.
47. Thomson, Mercenaries, 1999, fn 13.
48. Accounts of the Atlantic with political economy at the core can be found in: Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).
49. Perotin-Dumon, 'The Pirate and the Emperor'.
50. David J. Starkey, 'Pirates and Markets', in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, ed. C.R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
51. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107-24.
52. John L. Anderson, 'Piracy and World Markets: A Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation', in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, ed. C.R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 82-106.
53. Anderson, 'Piracy and World Markets', 86.
54. Anderson, 'Piracy and World Markets', 91.
55. Jacob Viner, 'Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', World Politics 1, no. 1 (1948): 1-29.
56. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy (New York: Academic Press, 1980).
57. Richard Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650-1830 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 142.
58. J.H. Parry, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 21.
59. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), 8.
60. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston 1890).
61. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, 40.
62. Frederic C. Lane, Profits From Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 58.
63. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
64. David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993).
65. Glete, Warfare at Sea, 73.
66. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 17.
67. As Bialuschewski notes, the Navigation Acts also gave colonial merchants a reason to do business with pirates and freebooters through the development of black markets in goods, especially when many goods were not available through British sources.
68. Arne Bialuschewski, 'Pirates, Markets and Imperial Authority: Economic Aspects of Maritime Depredations in the Atlantic World, 1716-1726', Global Crime 9, nos 1-2 (2008): 54.
69. Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars: Pirates vs. the Legitimate Navies of the World (London: Methuen, 2004).
70. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Harvard University Press, 1986).
71. Rediker, Between the Devil, 83.
72. Glete, Warfare at Sea, chap. 3.
73. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 135-140.
74. Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 (London: Methuen, 2007).
75. Patrick Crowhurst, The Defence of British Trade, 1689-1815 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977), 16-17.
76. Starkey, 'Pirates and Markets'.
77. Rediker, Between the Devil, chap. 6.
78. Rediker, Between the Devil, chap. 6.
79. It was only in the early eighteenth century that piracy became fused with an ideology of anti-statism, a protest against labour conditions in the merchant marine and navy, but also an alternative form of community to the state. See Rediker, Between the Devil, and Rediker, Villains of All Nations.
80. Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society.
81. David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990).
82. N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: Penguin, 2006).
83. Anderson, 'Piracy and World Markets', 83.
84. Perotin-Dumon, 'The Pirate and the Emperor', 32.
85. Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400-1700 (London: Collins, 1965).
86. Glete, Warfare at Sea, chap. 2.
87. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, chap. 1.
88. Glete, Warfare at Sea, 32.
89. Glete, Seapower and Naval Warfare, chap. 3.
90. The changes in naval organisation were reflected more broadly in the bureaucratisation of military power, which is well discussed by McNeill:
91. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
92. Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1-4.
93. Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
94. Rediker, Villains of All the Nations, 15.
95. The use of the term 'privateer' to describe these actors is somewhat contentious, but in line with scholars such as Kenneth Andrews.
96. Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
97. Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 11-12.
98. D.A. Baugh, 'Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of "A Grand Marine Empire"', in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689-1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 189.
99. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530-1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 135-6.
100. Rediker, Villains of All the Nations, 26.
101. J.S. Bromley, 'The French Privateering War, 1702-13', in Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), 213-41.
102. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, chap. 4.
103. David Cordingly, Life Among the Pirates (London: Abacus Cordingly, 1995), chap. 3.
104. Bromley, 'The French Privateering War'.
105. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, chap. 3.
106. Rodger, Command of the Ocean.
107. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 118-20 and 165-6.
108. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, chap. 11.
109. Much more could be said about the different approaches to financing the naval war as well: England's access to credit and capital during the post-1688 period was crucial to its development of naval power, much as France's less developed capital market and interest in pursing naval strength through taxation was a detriment to its naval power.
110. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 122-6.
111. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
112. D.W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
113. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
114. David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996).
115. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 77.
116. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 177-8.
117. Bromley, 'The French Privateering War'.
118. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 175-9.
119. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 157-9 and 175-7.
120. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 157-8.
121. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 177-8.
122. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise.
123. Thanks to anonymous referee for this point. British privateering ventures also differed greatly in form over the eighteenth century.
124. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise.
125. Perotin-Dumon, 'The Pirate and the Emperor', 41.
126. Baugh, 'Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce'.