Piracy as Political Prism: Sea Raiders and the Rise of the International Atlantic

Abstract This article places maritime violence at the center of the history of international ordering. It views the transformation of the nineteenth-century Atlantic from the deck of one ship, a Baltimore-built privateer called the Irresistible. The ship’s captain seized Spanish and Portuguese shipping under a privateering commission from the Oriental Republic. Sponsorship of privateers by the Oriental Republic and other new Latin American governments reflected an open-ended Atlantic constitutionalism that recognized sovereignty at multiple scales. That constitutional context formed the background to three cases involving the Irresistible and its crew that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The cases show how privateering politics opened to wide-ranging debates about the definition of states, war, and piracy, while preserving the indeterminacies of sovereignty in the new Atlantic system. That system, closing as it formed, was composed of new states pressured to align with powerful empires. Privateering disputes featured sharpening rhetoric about piracy as a crime under the law of nations while at the same time preserving a regime that protected low-level maritime violence. Situating the politics of piracy at the nexus of domestic and international orders, the article highlights the political uses and legal limits of the discourse of pirates as enemies of all and connects this history to an understanding of terrorism and states in the international order.