The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea

The Problem of Piracy explores the shifting legalities, practices, and representations of maritime predation across diverse ocean spaces in the early modern period. Particular focus is placed on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the activities and interactions of emerging global empires sought to better control maritime spaces through the criminalisation and condemnation of maritime predation, even as the practices and perceptions of maritime predation remained fluid in reality. Across nine chapters covering regions including southeast Asia, the Atlantic archipelago, the North African states, and the Caribbean Sea, the complexities of defining and criminalising maritime predation is explored, raising questions surrounding subjecthood, interpolity law, and the impacts of colonisation on the legal and social construction of ocean, port, and coastal spaces.