Publications
This Forum for the International Journal of Maritime History consists of an introduction and four articles providin detailed case studies of the occasional use of state power to regulate maritime predation in diverse waters and contexts. In these examples, states respectively negotiated with maritime communities in medieval England, sought a monopoly on violence in the South China Sea, collaborated with other states to police colonial Hong Kong, and dealt diplomatically with a local pirate hero to defend New Orleans. Across each article, the ‘state’ faced a particular problem of piracy, but could only occasionally exert power to manage it.
In this edited collection published by Amsterdam University Press, the complexities of defining and criminalizing maritime predation is explored across nine chapters covering regions including southeast Asia, the Atlantic archipelago, the North African states, and the Caribbean Sea. This collection of original case studies raises questions surrounding subjecthood, interpolity law, and the impacts of colonization on the legal and social construction of ocean, port, and coastal spaces. Seeking the meanings and motivations behind piracy, this book reveals that while European states attempted to fashion piracy into a global and homogenous phenomenon, it was largely a local and often idiosyncratic issue.
