Becoming Corsairs: Byron, British Property Rights and Orientalist Economics

GERARD COHEN-VRIGNAUD Becoming Corsairs: Byron, British Property Rights and Orientalist Economics L ord byron was famously associated with maritime piracy throughout his literary career, thanks to his dashing depictions of cor­ sairs and their swashbuckling at sea. Stricken with the itch of wanderlust and “Proscribed at home, / And taunted to a wish to roam,”1 many of his heroes sailed to and fro, living for stretches of time as pirates or suffering their depredations. Briefly mentioned in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), The Giaour (1813), Manfred (1817) and Beppo (1818), the subject of piracy appears at length for the first time in The Bride ofAbydos (1813), in which the protagonist, Selim, avenges an upbringing of humiliations at the hands of his pasha uncle by embarking on a campaign of high-seas terror. Cantos 2, 3 and 4 of DonJuan (1819-21) mark Byron’s last full treatment of the is­ sue, though the merciless pirate, Lambro, is less matinee idol than cruel vil­ lain, tearing his daughter Haidee away from the lovelorn Juan. But it was the publication of the poet’s most popular work, The Corsair (1814), that turned piracy into the emblem of Byronic heroism: readers were seduced by Conrad, an exile camped on a Mediterranean island who commands a renegade crew that attacks passing vessels. This passion for piracy in Byron’s ceuvre begs the question of why the subject generated such interest in the author and in the audience that turned The Corsair into one of the best-selling poetical works of the Ro­ mantic period.2 The Byronic pirate clearly owes much to the popular tradi­ tions of the medieval outlaw, the hero of peasant folklore and ballads who 1. Lord Byron, The Bride ofAbydos, in The Complete Poetical Works: Volume 3, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:321—22. Byron’s poetry is cited by canto and line number. Subsequent citations to the Bride appear parenthetically in the text. 2. At 25,000 copies, The Corsair outsold the individual cantos of Childe Harold and Don Juan and was bested in sales only by three Walter Scott verse romances. See William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 216-18. SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 685 686 GERARD COHEN-VRIGNAUD resists an unjust feudal order that oppresses the unprotected masses.3 Like Conrad, the archetypical Robin Hood takes up criminal life because he has been a victim of injustice at an early age and reveals his innate goodness in his courtesy towards women. But by the 18th century, romances glorifying audacious bandits were being relegated to the nursery, considered a de­ based form of cultural capital apt to entertain children but unfit for edifying adults.4 Why, then, did the Romantics resurrect the thieving outlaw for a postfeudal audience endowed with much-vaunted political rights? While no doubt attesting to the Romantic taste for medievalism, the figure of the noble outlaw, “certainly the single most popular hero of the Romantic Movement,”5 also engaged contemporary concerns. In particular, this essay argues that the appeal of pirates lay in how their robberies refracted the 19th century’s most combustible social question: the sanctity of property rights and the potential that more representative government might engi­ neer more equitable economic outcomes. The controversy over wealth subtends all the political battles of the period: a Reform movement agitat­ ing for universal suffrage not only disputed property as a qualification for the vote but also threatened legislative measures to redistribute economic surpluses. In this context, piratical activities could activate disparate ideolo­ gies, at once invoking the confiscations ofan antiquated and arbitrary' exec­ utive power or the incipient egalitarianism of an emerging social democ­ racy. Reconciling Byron’s ode to piracy with these political vectors appears daunting given its ambiguities. In the self-fashioning protagonist who has eschewed his noble prerogatives, risen above the “crowd of vulgar men,” lustily quenched “the thirsting eye ofEnterprize” and idealized the domes­ tic idyll of companionate marriage, we may identify the thirsting “I” of bourgeois meritocracy, individualism and privatized happiness.6 If we em­ phasize his murders, robberies and slave trading, combined with his lordly...