The Protection of Refusal: On Disavowal in the Indian Ocean

Lauren Benton reminds us that to write about piracy as historians (and anthropologists) is to engage in projects of “myth-making and myth-busting.” As she notes, pirates are either imagined as “colorful rogues…inherently anti-authoritarian actors who possessed a penchant for experimenting with alternative forms of political solidarity,” or they are depicted in a less renegade fashion, one that shows “their integration in established, if fluid, networks of patronage and power.” Instead of colorful outlaws, Benton (2014) argues that pirates are more akin to lawyers engaged in “legal posturing,” converting “booty into property.” As political actors, their politics are often far from revolutionary. Benton’s scholarship has been at the forefront of this latter school of myth-busting, and her work has been inspirational in rethinking the relationship between piracy, politics, and maritime space in order to tell a different kind of sea yarn. As she wrote in her 2005 CSSH essay, “[i]n my sea yarn, the oceans have a quality of lumpiness about them, pirates strain not to break the law, and international norms take shape not at Westphalia but at the edges of the Indian Ocean” (Benton 2005: 701–2).