Of Pirates, Empire, and Terror: An Interview with Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein
Rent from DeepDyve- Of Pirates, Empire, and Terror: An Interview with Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein
Editor’s note: These important new books, histories of the early modern period, are starkly different in their topics, approaches, and conclusions. Yet they both intersect the topic of piracy in its heyday. Lauren Benton’s book offers a striking revisionist interpretation of how pirates understood themselves in relation to the imperial expansion of the age, where Dan Edelstein—in a remarkable new interpretation of the origins of the French Revolutionary Terror—contributes a new reading of how pirates were viewed, especially in sources in early international thought. Both, interestingly, are quite critical of the way pirates are being conceived in contemporary critical theory. Humanity interviewed the authors about the intent and implications of their work.
Lauren, in your book you describe “pirates as lawyers.” What do you mean?
Popular culture presents an image of pirates as rogues. Some scholars elaborate on this image, casting pirates as stateless proto-revolutionaries. Both portrayals connect loosely to a prominent definition in international law of pirates as enemies of all mankind.
But it turns out that most maritime violence in the early modern world was carried out by people who defined themselves as loyal subjects of particular sovereigns. Very few pirates ever sailed under the black flag. They were much more likely to carry multiple flags so that, depending on the encounter, they could hoist the one that would offer them the best legal protection. Pirates were sophisticated legal actors. Far from embracing the role of rogues, most sought to present themselves as privateers, that is, as legitimate agents of sanctioned violence.
I present evidence in the book that, even in the midst of open raiding, pirates [End Page 75] worked to develop stories about why what they were doing was lawful. They exchanged and even forged commissions. They coordinated testimony. And they learned about arguments to present if they ever had to appear in prize courts to claim booty or in criminal courts to face charges of piracy. I describe this behavior as one version of a broader phenomenon, “legal posturing,” that occurred across legal cultures in imperial history.
How does viewing pirates as agents of a legal regime fit with the larger interpretation of the early modern imperial order in your book?
By insisting on their ties to sovereigns, mariners helped to affirm the idea that ships carried law with them into ocean space. I describe ships as “vectors of law.” Mariners extended imperial jurisdiction into the oceans as empires claimed control over sea lanes. Instead of lawless spaces, oceans were legal spaces, crisscrossed by thin jurisdictional corridors. I have always liked the way the historian James Muldoon described this legal regime of the seas. He called it a “condominium” and, even better, dubbed it “Christendom without the Pope.”
In researching the book, once I began to understand the ways that mariners’ legal strategies helped to shape oceans as spaces of law, I started to look for other patterns of association between legal practices and spatial representations in empires. Each chapter of the book explores this relation by pairing a set of legal practices with a geographic category. I analyze rivers and sea lanes as types of imperial corridors, and islands and hill country as examples of imperial enclaves.
The book is ordered chronologically because different geographic categories became salient in different periods. The control of rivers gripped the imagination of Europeans searching for entry points into Atlantic regions and improvising to form new political communities. Islands featured prominently in imperial projects of the late eighteenth century, when global rivalries drew attention to new regions for trade and resources. And mountainous zones, long represented as spheres removed from the influence of imperial conquests, became the focus of debates about the uneven territorial reach of colonial rule in the nineteenth century.
The resulting picture of the legal geography of European empires is very...
