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Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the political, economic, social, and cultural importance of piracy, images of Atlantic piracy and privateering are rarely represented in seventeenth century Dutch visual culture. The illustrations created by Herman Padtbrugge for A.O. Exquemelin's De Americaensche Zee-Roovers are a rare exception. The bestselling book, with its firsthand account of life as a buccaneer, was widely distributed throughout Europe and formed the basis of both our historical understanding of Caribbean piracy and its place in our poetic imagination. The transient distinction between piracy and privateering is linked to the cultural perception of the high seas as a freer, more open space, despite its increasing regulation and militarization. This article explores how the pictorial conventions used in the portrayal of pirates reflect their role as liminal figures -- constantly shifting between licit and illicit, Old and New Worlds, and national affiliations -- in the multicultural, rapidly evolving, and violent colonial context. Padtbrugge's portraits borrow the visual language of the cult of naval heroes, only altering a few iconographical markers to indicate on which side of the law the subject and his actions fell upon. The minor nature of these differences reflects how heroic privateering in the service of national interests and criminal piracy in service of the individual were two sides of the same coin, shedding light on the legal paradox of the state-sanctioned right to pillage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat, a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gonzallo Krrohn Barrba is a merchant marine of Norwegian and Madrilenian origin who has traveled the entire world. He was born in 1930 and represents the continuity of the Krohn saga, a family of distinguished mariners. Throughout his career, he sailed on different ships and made various voyages through the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Republic of Ghana, the North and Baltic Seas, South America, among other places. At 91 years old, Gonzallo is proud of his trajectory and his Norwegian and Madrilenian roots. [Extracted from the article]

Summary: In 1599, Dutch privateer Melchior van den Kerckhoven unlawfully captured the Venetian merchantman Ponte , which resulted in extensive legal proceedings before the Supreme Court of Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland. The Ponte case soon became the centrepiece for discussions about vicarious liability of shipowners for unlawful acts of their shipmasters, and – more importantly – about limitation of this liability to (the value of) their ship and cargo. Within these discussions, a secondary role was reserved for the case arising from the capture of the French ship Levrette by a Dutch merchantman in 1610. Based on extensive archival research, the present article offers a detailed reconstruction of the facts and proceedings of the Ponte and the Levrette case, and sets out how these cases were employed by Roman-Dutch lawyers to give shape to limited liability of shipowners for unlawful acts of their shipmaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American declaration of war passed by Congress in June 1812 was followed by a prize act which authorised the issuing of Letters of marque. These commissions or licenses allowed American citizens to fit out privately armed vessels to seize British ships. Although most privateers complied with Congress's instructions, their counterparts operating along the Maine coast used their commissions to further own economic self-interest by orchestrating pre-arranged captures with British merchants in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Since the British government encouraged its subjects to trade with the enemy to undermine the American war effort, American privateers assumed most of the risks. Merchants and mariners from as far away as New York and Connecticut traveled to Maine to trade with the British despite the hazards of detection. As these privateers engaged in fraud, other Americans turned to vigilante violence to uncover and foil these schemes. After the British occupied Eastern Maine in the summer of 1814 trading with the enemy became illegal on the British side of the border. Despite the risks, British merchants continued to engage in trade with the enemy. Ultimately, persistence of conflict and accommodation in the Northeastern Borderlands, the area comprising Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, helped undermined Eastern Maine's allegiance to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the War of 1812, hundreds of private armed vessels, or privateers, carrying letters of marque and reprisal from their respective governments, served as counterweights to the navies of Great Britain and the United States. By 1812, privateering was acknowledged as an ideal way to annoy the enemy at little or no cost to the government. Local citizens provided the ships, crews and prizes while the court and customs systems took in the appropriate fees. The entire process was legal, licensed and often extremely lucrative. Unlike the navy, privateers were essentially volunteer commerce raiders, determined to weaken the enemy economically rather than militarily. So successful were they, that from July 1812 to February 1815, privateers from the United States, Britain, and the British provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (as well as those sailing under French and Spanish flags) turned the shipping lanes from Newfoundland to the West Indies, Norway to West Africa, and even the South Pacific into their hunting grounds. In the early months of the war, privateers were often the only seaborne force patrolling their own coasts. With the Royal Navy pre-occupied with defending Britain and its Caribbean colonies from French incursions, there were relatively few warships available to protect British North American shipping from their new American foes. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had only a handful of frigates and smaller warships to protect their trade, supported by 174 generally despised gunboats. The solution was the traditional response of a lesser maritime power lacking a strong navy--private armed warfare, or privateering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the War of 1812, American privateers captured more than 1,000 British merchant ships as "prizes." Because privateers were privately owned, and sought profit, not glory, in combat, an obvious question is whether they made money. Perhaps surprisingly, determining the profitability of privateers is difficult. Even early in the war, privateer owners petitioned Congress to make privateering profitable by lowering customs duties. Their complaints led two treasury secretaries to use economic theory to try to understand the economic incentives for privateering. Twice, Congress made decisions guided by competing theories, ultimately lowering customs duties, yet apparently the subsidy did not increase the number of prizes brought into U.S. ports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Iberian consulates in the United States identified the emergence of a "privateering archipelago," a new revolutionary interimperial legal/economic regime stretching from Rhode Island to the greater Caribbean in the post-Napoleonic decade. Spanish consuls' successful navigation of the privateering archipelago enabled them to expand the power of Cuban slavers into the southern U.S. Spanish consuls' confrontation with privateers became a driving force in the revival of the slave trade after its international condemnation at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Even though there were many ways in which Spanish consulates used the entanglement between privateering and slaving to strengthen the colonial hold on slavery, it was by means of whitening passports that they sought to institutionalize their power in the privateering archipelago. Intended to disenfranchise free gente de color and to re-commodify African slaves, the policy of whitening passports ended up marginalizing mariners and alienating them from consuls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gentili's conceptualization of war as a conflict between states attempted to limit the legitimacy of war to external wars only, thus precluding the legitimacy of civil wars. It reflected both the emergence of sovereign states and the vision of international law as a law among polities rather than individuals. The conceptualization of war as a dispute settlement mechanism among polities rather than a punishment for breach of the law of nations and the idea of the bilateral justice of war humanized the conduct of warfare and the content of peace treaties. The idea of perfect war excluded brigandage, piracy, and civil wars from its purview. Some scholars have suggested that perfect war had a dark side, legitimizing imperial expansion. Others have cautioned that Gentili explicitly opposed imperial expansion rather adopting anti-imperialist stances. This article suggests that these ambivalent readings of the Gentilian oeuvre reflect the ambivalence of the early modern law of nations. Under the early modern law of nations, aggression for the sake of empire was clearly unjust; nonetheless, imperial expansion took place. Whereas 'a law which many transgress[ed] [wa]s nonetheless a law', there was a wide divide between theory and practice. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the eighteenth century, the words 'pirate' and 'privateer' had no comprehensive English legal meanings. Scholars today who attempt to determine who in history was a 'pirate' run afoul of this language problem; this article aims to clarify it by tracing the etymology of 'privateer' in late seventeenth-century English Jamaica, where the word saw a great deal of use. Seeing Jamaica as a laboratory for language use and legal development, rather than simply a site of problematic lawlessness within the empire, it reconsiders the consolidation of English state power at the turn of the century. This article argues that 'pirate', an ancient but ill-defined word in early modern England, generally referred to a sea robber who acted unlawfully, but that much lawful sea raiding also occurred under various names. In about 1660, the word 'privateer' was born, first taking root in the new English colony of Jamaica, where it referred to the island's growing community of private seafarers. After an Anglo-Spanish treaty in 1670, Jamaicans gradually conflated 'privateer' and 'pirate', a process that culminated in a law that promised death to both. The law spread from the periphery to the metropolitan centre, but English imperial officials, prompted by the events of the Glorious Revolution, repurposed the Jamaican words, clarifying and distinguishing them to exert greater control over state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the establishment of unauthorized U.S. consulates throughout the Spanish Empire transformed both the infrastructure of Spanish colonial rule and the diplomatic relationship between Spain and the Early Republic. In places such as New Orleans, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba, U.S. consuls exercised extraterritorial jurisdiction over national citizens without the authorization of Spanish imperial authorities, sparking intense diplomatic conflicts over the boundaries of national sovereignty. Invoking diplomatic reciprocity, Spanish colonial officials also made use of unauthorized consulates in Savannah, New Orleans, and Natchez in order to contain U.S. expansion, protect Spanish subjects and property, and police runaway slaves and Native Americans. Over the 1800s, these ad-hoc uses of unauthorized consulates challenged metropolitan designs and international diplomatic norms as they locked both U.S. state authorities and Spanish colonial governments in negotiations of state sovereignty, transnational migration, and reciprocity and created a new institutional framework of transnational governance in the Spanish Caribbean and the North American Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1740, Commodore George Anson's expedition to the Pacific once more demonstrated the chronic fragility of Spanish defenses in the entire region. The success and impunity enjoyed by the British privateer illustrated the need for the Spanish crown to consider serious defense reform. The main reforms focused on the improvement of the Armada Real and the construction of fortifications. This article seeks to determine how successful Bourbon reforms were in improving the defense system in the Pacific after Anson´s expedition. For the Spanish crown the Pacific was a peripheral region that for a long time had been dealing with threats and challenges from other colonial powers. This article will also assess the empowerment of local authorities and merchants to face the menace posed by the British and other colonial powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the War of 1812, the United States had a small navy and relied on privateers—private armed ships that sought to make money—to engage in commercial warfare against Britain. If privateers stopped a British merchant ship, or an American trading under a British license, they sailed it into a friendly port. If deemed a “good prize,” the vessel and goods were sold, the net proceeds divided between the privateer’s owners, officers, and crew. But sometimes, the stop and search went beyond the bounds of law: the seizure of the Ann Maria, a tiny Virginia schooner, off St. Thomas, by the Baltimore privateer Nonsuch, led all the way to the Supreme Court, and reveals the dark side of a system based on legalized robbery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the business methods of the British East India Company (EIC) through an examination of the journeys of sea captain and privateer John Saris as outlined in the work "The Voyage of Captain John Saris to Japan, 1613." Focus is given to events describe in the work omitted from a 1900 version edited by Ernest Satow. The importance of plunder to the EIC's commercial tactics is given particular focus. The author argues that historians much utilize manuscripts, as opposed to edited narratives, in order to better explore British imperialism and the onset of global capitalism.

American economic statecraft rose to new geopolitical prominence with reevaluations of international trade agreements and tariffs. State-backed industrial espionage remains understudied in its relation to great power competition, despite its ongoing impact on the American economy and security. This article explores a controversial institutional strategy for countering state-backed industrial espionage in a manner that is compatible with the free-enterprise model of American business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piracy holds a special place within the field of international law because of the universal jurisdiction that applies: any state may seize a pirate ship on the high seas and decide upon the penalties to be imposed, as is currently the case with Somali and West African pirates. Unlike today, piracy was the norm in pre-modern times. Maritime trade and piracy went hand in hand. At the same time, kings and emperors recruited their admirals from among pirates. This raises the question of how princes, states and cities distinguished between legal and illegal violence at sea. How did they deal with maritime conflict among themselves and among their respective subjects and citizens? This article puts maritime conflict management in a European, global and long term perspective while avoiding anachronistic and teleological approaches. Finally, it argues that pre-modern conflict management is relevant to understand maritime security in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customary international law has governed high seas piracy for many centuries and is now codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC). In this article, we discuss the reasons why enforcement against piracy today is less effective than three hundred years ago. We contend that crime, including the crime of piracy, can be modeled as a rational choice that is responsive to expected rewards and punishments. Based on this view, we argue that three hundred years ago, the free rider problem resulting from enforcement on the high seas was less prevalent than it is today because seaborne trade was more concentrated in the vessels of a few countries, making enforcement more like internal than international policing. The persistence of piracy today also stems from a continuing low probability of capture coupled with lenient punishments. In addition to enforcement differences, we contrast the sources of piracy in the two eras—in the earlier period, the end of privateering led many privateers to engage in piracy, whereas today, the main source of pirates in the Western Indian Ocean is the existence of a “failed state,” and off West Africa and South East Asia pirates are common criminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gulf of Mexico played an important role in the power struggles between Europe and the United States for control of access to valuable resources in North and South America. Spain, France, Great Britain, and the burgeoning United States utilized this vast body of water to jockey for positions of power, especially for control of New Orleans. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries these countries wrangled for control of the Gulf through treaty, trade, warfare, and privateering. Serving many different roles, ships engaged in transporting commodities, protecting places and resources, and antagonizing rivals. Between wars, commercial competition, and disasters at sea, many vessels were lost to the depths of the Gulf. One such vessel, the Mardi Gras Shipwreck, may have served in one or more of these roles during its career. By examining the historical record, archaeologists can reconstruct the sociocultural, political, and economic milieus to establish the historical context in which the shipwreck and its story reside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The juridical conflict concerning the merchant vesselDe Vriendschap, boarded and inspected by the English in the spring of 1745, reflects the difficulty in respecting international treaties and the imperatives of war. After becoming a neutral power in the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic tried to preserve its commercial shipping under the motto ‘free ship, free goods’, drawing on old treaties such as that concluded with England in 1674. The aim was to bag the freight and at the same time to prevent the nations at war from declaring the cargoes of Dutch merchants ‘bonne prise’. During the War of Austrian Succession, the situation in the Mediterranean deteriorated around 1744–1745, when the increasingly exasperated English seized neutral merchantmen carrying merchandise for France. Very different actors then intervened and imagined pragmatic solutions for complex tangles. A direct negotiation at the highest level led to the repudiation of the Admiralty of Port Mahon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to Halvard Leira and Benjamin de Carvalho, the decision of European states to establish consulships in foreign ports was responsible for the intertwinement of diplomacy and privateering at the end of the seventeenth century. Based on a case study – the arrest of Swedish prizes in the Netherlands in 1644 – this contribution will explain that the connection of diplomacy, privateering and prize law existed long before states appointed consuls to control the activities of their own privateers. Already in the first half of the seventeenth century, the state’s direction of foreign policy, the activities of diplomats and military and political developments decided the outcome of prize cases. Governments always had to make compromises between the implementation of prize law and the maintenance of their political interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Victims of war have existed since time immemorial and, in the same vein, so have certain mechanisms for the redress of their injuries. Admiralty courts in early modern Europe are historical platforms in which certain groups of victims of maritime conflict could seek compensation under an international prize jurisdiction, as per the law of nations. This article will briefly introduce the reader to the way in which European countries applied their prize jurisdiction. It will then focus on compensation cases during the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century to show how admiralties implemented the right to compensation during these conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean Sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy, and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war, or international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard.This article explores how Barbary piracy, privateering, and corsairing acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society. Drawing on recent ‘revisionist’ accounts of the expansion of international society, it argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of law and sovereignty across the Mediterranean littoral whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences indicates that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’, an indeed to international stratification uneven development, than is commonly acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers three plays on the theme of piracy written by Thomas Heywood between 1597 and 1631:The fair maid of the west, part Iandpart II, andFortune by land and sea(co-authored with William Rowley). Though all of these plays are set during the reign of Elizabeth I, onlyThe fair maid of the west, part Iwas written during her lifetime, the two later works being written during the reigns of her successors, James I and Charles I. These plays can be read as a vehicle by which the very different attitudes towards piracy, foreign policy, and national expansion demonstrated by the three consecutive monarchs were interrogated, contrasted, and critiqued. Considered separately each of these works offers a snapshot of the popular view of piracy and privateering at the time of writing; read together they give a much broader insight into contemporary attitudes towards the evolution of England as a maritime power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tyson Reeder examines the maturation of the American state apparatus as it asserted control over the transnational movement and extraterritorial violence of its citizens. Between 1816 and 1820, privateers manned by U.S. citizens plundered vessels on behalf of the South American revolutionary José Gervasio Artigas. These privateers' illicit activities in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea revealed the problems that such "borderwaters" posed to U.S. claims of national sovereignty. European officials condemned the failure of the U.S. government to assert sovereignty over its citizens on the high seas, jeopardizing the United States' international standing. Beginning in 1819 U.S. officials implemented effective strategies to repress the privateers and improve the government's reputation among European powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patent trolls are categorically demonized as threatening American innovation and industry. But whether they are a threat that antitrust law is equipped to deal with is a complex question that depends on the particular type of patent troll and activities they engage in. This Article looks specifically at privateer patent trolls: entities that acquire their patents from operating entities and assert them against other industry members. In the particular context of privateering, antitrust law is almost certainly not the proper legal solution. Privateering does raise significant issues: circumventing litigation constraints, evading licensing obligations, and raising the cost and frequency of patent assertions. Nevertheless, there are clear doctrinal and practical roadblocks to leveraging antitrust law to police privateering activity generally, and there exist readily available alternative regimes that are more naturally suited to the task. Antitrust law's role in governing privateering activity should instead be more narrowly guided by its unique strengths, such as limiting collusive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to analyze briefly the presence of piracy in Hispaniola between mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, giving a brief insight about actors, characteristics and consequences so as to establish a relation between the piracy's development and the evolution of some aspects about the Island in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period 1655–1665, between the First and Second Anglo-Dutch Wars, French and English privateers with Swedish and Portuguese commissions preyed on the shipping of the Dutch Republic. In this article, it is proposed that this activity was employed by the English and French governments as a language of international politics. In their toleration and, on occasion, defence of the use of foreign letters of marque by their subjects against a nominally neutral state, Mazarin, Cromwell, Louis XIV and Charles II deliberately and flagrantly violated the conventions of international law or religion. Their purpose was to make clear to the States General and Grand Pensionary John de Witt their discontent with Dutch policy, diplomacy or trading practices. Temporary or permanent bans on the practice served to communicate a message of benevolence and friendship, or were aimed at creating détente. These signals, however, were generally misunderstood by the receiving party. Employing as their frame of reference for interpreting these messages their own republican traditions, their decentralised governmental structure and Grotius's writings on international maritime law, the Dutch authorities perceived English and French attitudes towards privateering with foreign commissions as symptomatic of monarchical arbitrariness and/or mercantilist jealousy. It was the absence of international consensus regarding the legal boundaries of privateering that encouraged its use as a language of international politics; at the same time, however, it also contributed to fundamental misunderstandings between the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about the age of Atlantic Piracy focusing on the study of Edward Thache better known as Blackbeard the Pirate with comparison with other Atlantic pirates. The article talks about the changes in the political and economic conditions faced by Jamaican privateers. The article talks about misfortunes and poverty suffered by pirates. Topics include genealogical evidences of Edward Thache and studies on the history of Blackbeard by authors Nathaniel Mist and Hugh F. Rankin.

There has been widespread and vociferous condemnation of Somali piracy and several states have used force against the pirates. This reflects the prevailing view of pirates as belligerents and aggressors who act wrongly. In this article, I challenge this view by defending the conditional moral permissibility of piracy. More specifically, I first argue that piracy can be morally permissible when certain conditions are met. These are what I call the principles of ‘justa piratica’, that is, the principles of just piracy. Second, I claim that these conditions are likely to apply to some Somali pirates. Third, as a corollary, I argue that the case of piracy shows that one of the shibboleths of Just War Theory – that a war cannot be just on both sides – is mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Semiotic and institutional developments relating to the governance of the English oceanic empire during the second half of the seventeenth century significantly increased state agents' power to control isolated, violent maritime encounters. The paper describes these developments in relation to piracy, privateering, and the control of seamen and argues that they have a common mechanism of social control: the manipulation of temporality. By creating capacities for the institutionalized reinterpretation of isolated acts of maritime violence, these developments reshaped the temporal horizons of such encounters by making future accountability to state agents, state categories of meaning, and state processes of adjudication more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of the term 'privateer' to describe private military and security companies (PMSCs) employed to fight piracy at sea, particularly near Somalia. Topics include the defensive nature of PMSC activities, U.S. Navy actions to keep sea-lanes accessible to commerce, and the responsibilities of shippers to defend their own vessels.

The article discusses the smuggling of slaves by foreign privateers into the U.S. in the Early Republic era. It comments on the impact of Atlantic geopolitics and particularly the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the Latin American Wars of Independence. The author particularly explores smuggling activity in Louisiana and addresses the role of the Spanish borderlands, including the Floridas. The activities of Louisiana smugglers and privateers Pierre Laffite and Jean Laffite are also considered.

During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), there were attempts to support colonial maritime war by legislation, and the American Act of 1708 can be seen as their culmination. Historians who study privateering or colonial history have referred to this act in several contexts, such as reform in prize administration, naval impressment in American colonies, and Spanish- American trade. However, the political and economic interests behind this act have not been fully investigated. By examining the process of the enactment of the American Act together with antecedent attempts to promote colonial maritime war in parliament, this article reveals the political and vested interests involved in the act, the relations between them, and the influence they had on the content of the act. This analysis will show the complex interaction between politics, trade, and colonial maritime war in the early-18th-century American colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]