Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 by Mark G. Hanna (review)

In a revealing anecdote that starts this ambitious investigation into the political role of pirates in shaping colonial British American society in the seventeenth century, Mark G. Hanna recalls that Bernard Bailyn asked him whether piracy explained the entire rise of British empire. Hanna cheekily responded that it did. Bailyn demurred. This book is an attempt to show that Bailyn was wrong. Does it succeed?

Hanna argues that wherever piracy flourished it was because landed communities had political reasons for hindering imperial attempts to define piracy as entirely criminal. Thus, Hanna sees pirates neither as marginal men detached from ordinary society nor as psychotic criminals. Rather, he sees land-based acceptance of pirate nests as part of colonial attempts to contest the terms of entry into the British empire. Hanna argues that if we are to understand the transformation of English America from 1688 to 1720, then we need to see support and opposition to piracy as part of an extended colonial debate about the terms by which private colonies entered the British empire. Although he covers piracy from Sir Francis Drake onward, Hanna emphasizes the little studied but vitally important years of the 1690s, years in which the position of the American colonies was especially parlous. He makes a convincing case that 1696 was a crucial year in convincing Britain to adopt a fierce antipiracy strategy, headed by Edward Randolph, surveyor general of customs in America and a key agent of imperial change. More to the point, the fierce disputes over piracy in the colonies in 1696 reveal, Hanna believes, alternative views of empire. One side—the side wanting to get rid of pirates and that followed the lead taken by Jamaica as early as 1688—accepted imperial integration as the price of colonial prosperity and efficiency. But other Americans, notably in nonroyal colonies, were more interested in the immediate economic and political benefits that having pirates in their midst brought to hard-pressed and contentious local societies. The first group won the battle, but the fight over how colonies should be organized within the empire was fierce. Hanna argues that tolerance for pirates was a crucial test of where colonists and colonies stood on the issue of imperial integration. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 is a valuable addition to a sparse literature on politics in this period.

The question is whether the political changes of the 1690s that Hanna correctly identifies as fundamental to shaping the eighteenth-century British empire can be attributed almost solely to the war on the pirates that began in that decade and lasted till the 1730s. Here, I think Hanna overstates his case. Bailyn is probably right in downplaying the role of the war on pirates. Hanna’s problem is his treatment of Jamaica, a colony central to his claims and the focus of an important chapter. He believes, correctly, that what happened in Jamaica (the major center of piracy in English America in the 1670s) influenced what happened elsewhere. But his knowledge of Jamaica, based entirely, it seems, on sources held in official archives in London without any immersion into the records kept in the island, is hazy. In particular, he does not fully engage with the influential and convincing arguments of Nuala Zahedieh’s The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660-1700 (New York, 2010) that piracy was an ideal start-up trade for a burgeoning colony, bringing in valuable bullion that helped kick-start the plantation economy. Zahedieh also argues that piracy became a problematic activity once the plantation sector became a significant element in the business strategies of highly influential London merchant-elites. Her argument is based on deep archival research into both Jamaican and British archives. She shows that there were deep-seated social and economic changes occurring in Jamaica in the...