The Rise and Fall of Caribbean Piracy: A Socio-Technical Analysis of the War of Spanish Succession, Maritime Innovation, and Edward Randolf’s Policy

This paper argues that the mode and historical context in which piracy ascended in the Caribbean after the War of the Spanish Succession, as well as the historical interrelation between maritime technology and pirate tactics, coalesced into a diachronic Damocles Sword that resulted in the downfall of piracy in the Golden Age. Sanctioning piratical enterprises as a subconventional maritime strategy displayed a geopolitical reliance on piracy by great powers. However, the depraved treatment conventional sailors received across all major European navies generated a social stratum that eventually bore the Golden Age of Piracy, while simultaneously contributing significantly to British naval supremacy in the eighteenth-century New World. The tactical, operational, and social technologies that this stratum of skilled seamen deployed initially overwhelmed national navies, leveraged popular support in peripheral communities, and ensured a dynamic supply and acquisitions system that granted pirate crews near immunity to the attrition of maritime operations. However, as pawns of history, they fell victim to their own success. At the turn of the mid-eighteenth Edward Randolph’s sophisticated anti-piracy policy, the obsolescence of pirate societies, and the promotion of the view that piratical endeavors are wholly parasitic, made both states and societies hunt them to extinction.