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105 SIX Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? The Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, – Eliga H. Gould A s Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , the essence of modern capitalism is its commitment to quotidian regularity, gradual accumulation, and the rule of law; but for these qualities, the ethos of the commercial bourgeoisie would be indistinguishable from that of the premodern brigand. For Weber, the chief exemplar of capitalism’s rational side was Benjamin Franklin.¹ Perhaps that is why historians have so eagerly sought modernity’s roots in the western Atlantic , with the American colonies supplying what Robin Blackburn calls the “forced draught” of change in areas as varied as market discipline, social and racial hierarchies, popular sovereignty, and national identity.² As Weber’s juxtaposition suggests, however, modernity captures only one dimension of Britain’s eighteenth-century expansion. Whether we consider the founding of white colonies of settlement, the dispossession and enslavement of nonEuropean populations, or the onset of the “age of democratic revolution,” the British Atlantic’s development was no less indebted to piracy and other forms of irregular violence, all of which Weber believed to be antithetical to both capitalist rationalism and, ultimately, modernity. Taking as its focus the long century between the English Restoration and the aftermath of the American Revolution, this chapter examines the implications of this double ethos for the legal geography of the Englishspeaking Atlantic. In particular, it explores the interdependence between the British and American commitment to the rule of law, which both peoples took to be a benchmark of their own modernity, and the strongly held conviction that the western and southern Atlantic was a place of contested sovereignties, diminished legalities, and warring imperialisms.³ Simplistic, distorting, and offensive though the perception was, Britons regarded both Africa and the Americas as a zone distinct from Europe—a region where even “law-abiding” peoples (metropolitan as well as creole) were free to engage in practices that were unacceptable in Europe. Far from being a per- 106 Eliga H. Gould spective unique to Britain, moreover, the notion that the extra-European Atlantic lay beyond the pale was shared by many Americans and exerted a powerful influence over how they understood their own situation, both before and after the Revolution. Even as the two English-speaking empires affirmed their own modernity, Weber’s theoretically distinct categories of legal accumulation and lawless aggression remained explicitly intertwined in the wider Atlantic, and the ethos of both the British Empire and the United States continued to depend on their situation in a region where acts of impunity were the norm. This violent construction of the outer world presupposed the law-based character of international relations within Europe. Despite the recent attention that scholars have paid to the xenophobic strands of Georgian patriotism, Britons tended to regard Europe as a zone of law and civility—“the most civilized Quarter of the Globe,” as an English pamphleteer wrote in .⁴ In its account of the capitulation of the British garrison on Minorca in , the Annual Register made a point of noting the “kindness and tenderness” with which the French and Spanish treated the ragged defenders as they surrendered their arms. “It has been assured,” wrote the journal’s anonymous correspondent, “that several of the common soldiers of both armies [i.e., of France and Spain], were so moved by the wretched condition of the garrison, that involuntary tears dropped from them as they passed.”⁵ In extolling such humanitarian tendencies, Britons did not hesitate to claim a special role for themselves. As an Irish pamphleteer observed in , Europe’s modern history would have been an unrelenting story of slavery and impoverishment, “but for the intervention of Great Britain.”⁶ If the British were sure of their place in Europe’s civilized consortium, however, they readily conceded that this commitment to the law of nations was not unique to them but was one manifestation of what the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel called “the honour and humanity of the Europeans.”⁷ There was obviously an element of wishful thinking in this depiction of international relations, as anyone who had experienced warfare on the Continent could attest. Not surprisingly, the British tended to be especially unforgiving of infractions by their mortal enemy France—“the most Christian brute,” as a pamphlet detailing French outrages in the Netherlands styled Louis XV during the s.⁸ Yet even when European powers violated formal treaties and agreements, writers tended to...

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