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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]

During the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–4) the fleet of the Dutch Republic was no match for the numerically far greater British navy. Her merchant ships were taken and the navy was forced to protect the home waters and stay in their own ports. In their own numbers as well as those of their captured prizes, Zeeland privateer captains lagged far behind the successes of earlier wars. Nevertheless, they received a heroic reception; something that had not occurred in previous wars to such an extent. Only 16 privateering captains were commissioned by the Zeeland Admiralty, yet in less than two years they captured 72 prizes and ransomed another 51 ships. The proceeds of the part which is known amounted to 514,389 guilders, making the total an estimated 2.44 million guilders. The omnipresence of British privateers and naval warships in the English Channel and North Sea made it a dire necessity for Dutch privateers to ransom, rather than capture prizes; this was something never done before on such a large scale. For decades the Dutch Republic had lived in peace, so the Zeeland privateering captains lacked experience. Nearly 30 per cent of them were of foreign origin, mainly French and American. [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]

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The essay argues that the seventeenth-century law of piracy was central for the conceptualization of "racial difference" in English legal, political, and religious discourse. In the law of piracy, race originally served to curtail the liberty of European seafarers in the Mediterranean, but was quickly used to render emerging systems of slavery more severe in the Atlantic. This essay uses an English street ballad of 1624 to illustrate and explore these entanglements. It suggests that "race" as a system of thought originates as a strategy for the violent subjection of populations constructed as non-white, but also for curtailing the political choices open to those constructed as white. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes the prize law of the Confederate States of America. Due to the Union's blockade of the South's coastline, Confederate judges heard very few prize cases. But when they did, they closely hewed to the prize law of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes the efforts of the Confederate States of America to convince Great Britain to support its secession from the United States. Although the South's leaders were confident that Britain's need for cotton would lead it to become an ally, numerous factors—including the British public's aversion to slavery—contributed to the country remaining neutral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes the work of Spain's consuls in Key West between 1829 and 1870. Although Spain sold Florida to the United States in 1821, it retained a keen interest in Key West (primarily due to the city's proximity to Cuba). As their country's "eyes and ears," Spain's consuls were expected to keep their superiors in Madrid briefed on the latest developments, a task they pursued with vigor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the 'Jamaica discipline' suggests that all Anglo-American privateering and pirate groups operating between 1660 and 1726 were linked via a common set of ideas, such as democracy and an aversion to Caribbean elites. The idea has been influential in shaping both scholarly and popular perceptions of seventeenth-century privateers and eighteenth-century pirates. This article argues that the Jamaica discipline is not applicable to seventeenth-century privateers, but rather creates a fundamental misunderstanding of them. Seventeenth-century privateers were not as unified as the idea of them having a discipline suggests. They were not nearly as radical as the discipline posits, yet they did have a set of social norms that developed over the period. The article suggests that the notion of a 'discipline' that united pirates and privateers across the 1660–1726 period should be jettisoned, as it oversimplifies the complexities that dictated the presence of different social norms in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible to study the development of the legal regulation of naval forces without analysing the supranational legal component. Although the law of the sea, as defined above, has traditionally had an international private and public legal dimension, the relevant sources have for a long time been primarily customary and concerned primarily the commercial exploitation of the sea and merchant shipping. All references to the maritime power of states and their rights at sea in this dimension did not concern aspects of the specificities of military activity at sea. In fact, both normative references and doctrinal reflections on international, supranational standards of naval activity only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. The purpose of the article is to define the legal acts for the administrative regulation of the naval forces and to formulate approaches to universalising their definition based on the ontology of holistic approaches to legal regulation and doctrine making. Methodology. This study applies the methodology of interdisciplinary comparison, methods of content analysis and integration of heterogeneous features into the system, which allowed to obtain a new scientific approach, namely to characterise the legal regulation of naval forces in the context of its universalisation and to consider the formation of maritime policy in the future, including the national one. The main impetus for the development of holistic approaches to this type of activity should be seen in the adoption of bilateral and collective intergovernmental agreements on maritime issues, in particular. In particular, it is possible to refer to the documents that initiated the standardisation of the treatment of neutral and enemy ships at sea, which can be traced back to 1780. In addition, military and legal practice, especially in the context of the Black Sea Straits regime, has repeatedly raised the issue of determining the criteria for the affiliation of a particular ship to the navy. In the course of the nineteenth century, a significant number of bilateral treaties regulating aspects of naval cooperation were developed, taking into account the practice of national unilateral acts and decisions of courts martial and tribunals, and then became the subject of research by relevant scholars who were closely involved in naval practice and, at the same time, in the formation of norms. Results. The author concludes that at the supranational level, the issues of regulating the activities of naval forces have been traced in the treaty dimension since the late eighteenth century, primarily in the concepts of sovereignty, prohibition of privateering and prosecution of piracy, and restrictions on the activities of naval forces in certain areas. The unregulated nature of a number of aspects of supranational naval activities, notably the right of entry to foreign ports, the procedure for stopping and inspecting foreign merchant ships at sea, and the limits of the powers of foreign coastal authorities over a warship, has led to an active search for appropriate acceptable international customs and attempts to substantiate them with legal doctrine based on national statutes and the established practice of maritime states. The development of the relevant legislation is still in progress and is far from being completed, given the challenges of Ukrainian naval doctrine and the level of implementation and incorporation of international and foreign experience. In this regard, the naval policy in its internal and external dimensions is of particular importance, which is regulated both by national acts of an administrative and legal nature and by international legal sources of various origins.

This article examines the service of royalist privateers during the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1652–4. Most scholarship has focused on the remnants of Prince Rupert's royalist fleet and its eventual retreat to France in 1653, which is taken as the conclusion of the naval theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1639–55. Rather than focusing on Prince Rupert, this article identifies the principal royalist privateers operating outside of his fleet. In turn it demonstrates that these royalists pursued a vigorous guerre de course against the Commonwealth and Protectorate, continuing the Civil Wars at sea. This article demonstrates the ways in which the Cromwellian navy dealt with these privateers and concludes by arguing that they operated within a wider royalist naval strategy spearheaded by the exiled Charles II and James, Duke of York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the descriptors attached to cyber operations and cyber actors is crucial to communicating the nature of these entities and the influence they wield in cyberspace. Given the ever-increasing threat that corporations, governments, and the everyday consumer face from these entities, it is paramount that respondents evaluate and apply the most appropriate descriptors when communicating about such incidents. In this paper, we discuss whether a ‘privateer’ analogy has relevance in this space given the current state of cyber-actor behaviour and the increase in the number of governments relying on external experts to design, construct, and execute cyber-disruption operations. In determining the appropriateness of the ‘privateer’ analogy, we explore the following questions: • What types of labels are available for this private actor-perpetrated, but state-purposed cyber-operational conduct? • Based on a brief history of privateering, how and why might privateering be an appropriate analogy? • Given the strict legal paradigmatic constraints surrounding the availability of the concept and the availability of modern Law of Armed Combat (LoAC) concepts to cover the practice, how and why is privateering not an appropriate analogy? Ultimately, we conclude that the applicability of the ‘privateering’ analogy in the context of cyber operations is dubious. It appears that international law has developed beyond the need (and desire) for privateers and privateering operations. In this discussion, we consider legal and regulatory alternatives for responding to cyber behaviour that may still resemble privateering under effective (and much more current) international law.

The relevance of privateering-related archives for maritime history and (early modern) history at large has been increasingly recognized in the past decades. This recognition has gone hand in hand with the prominent role that these archives have assumed in some of the largest projects in the digital humanities, such as the Prize Papers project, which facilitates research into these collections and reveals the multiplicity of data that they contain. This article reports on the creation of Global Privateering, a (pilot) project that is striving to create a user-friendly open access database for a set of privateering dossiers from St Malo, France. It has been a collaboration across disciplines – namely, history and information technology – as well as educational establishments, partnering universities and vocational schooling. The creation of this open access maritime database has been a positive experience for all parties involved, as the complementarity of skills and expertise has been evident, and the benefits have been mutual and multiple. This inspires further exploration of such collaborations and the further expansion of the Global Privateering platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the diplomatic relations between Venice and the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I (1413-1421), focusing on the negotiations for the release of the Venetians captured during the ottoman raid in Negroponte (1414). The ransom of the captives will be analysed as a part of the flexible Venetian diplomacy, with the aim to study the original sides of this activity and its practical aspects, such as the role of the diplomatic actors and the impact of privateering. [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]

Copyright of Ajalooline Ajakiri is the property of Ajalookirjanduse Sihtastutus Kleio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 paper focuses on the topic of the impact of piracy on the institutional framework in the Kingdom of Naples during the Modern Age (XVIth ̶ XVIIth centuries). Many historians agree that the continuous Ottoman̶-Barbaresque raids on the coast of Southern Italy played a key role in the conditions of fragility and weakness of the South and its progressive marginalization from the economic and productive networks of early modern Europe. Consequently, the paper first analyzes the reason for military weakness of the Kingdom of Naples, and then it examines the effect of defensive vulnerability on the political-constitutional field through a Juridical culture’s paradigmatic text: the Tractatus de potestate Proregis et Collaterali Consilii et regimine Regni by Giovan Francesco De Ponte. In hindsight, the evaluation of the strategies of the government during the Spanish viceroyalty shows how the strong alliance between the Spanish Monarchy and the lawyers-administrators (the noble of robes) was a formidable legitimizing machine for the monarchy, but it also leads to the nobility progressively moving away from its traditional role of government and military defense. The final result of this compromise was to deprive the Kingdom of the only means that they had that could effectively counter attack the maritime dominance of the Ottoman-Barabresque pirates and feed a growing sense of insecurity which deeply scarred the fragile political balances of the southern Monarchy.

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]

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Copyright of Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar (RUHM) is the property of Centro de Estudios de la Guerra and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The cartographic representations commonly offered of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries Caribbean by historians and contemporaries alike do not reflect its complexity or dynamics. They reflect far more European Powers’ aspirations in America than the reality of the multiple sovereignties, particularly Amerindian, that exercised there – or the very absence of sovereignty. The revolutions of that period and the concomitant dissolution of Spanish and French imperial sovereignties in the Caribbean amplified the range and volume of the fraudulent trans-imperial maritime circulations which, already endemic in the 18th century, had long thwarted the colonial states' claims to any monopoly. The study of these circulations at the turn of the 19th century reveals an alternative geography of the Caribbean, composed of an archipelago of sovereignties underpinned by a maritime framework, the interloping Caribbean. This geography did not evade the supporters of the new sovereignties in America – the United States, Haiti and the independent governments of Spanish America – who were the product of this as much as they benefited from it; upon it then arose, around Saint-Domingue, the revolutionary Caribbean.

The story of William Kidd perfectly highlights the possible shift between the legal activities of privateers and the criminal world of piracy, as well as the instrumentalisation by governments of these "henchmen" used to serve the imperialist designs of European nations. By retracing the course of this merchant turned privateer and then pirate, who unleashed the hatred of the English authorities, before being hailed as popular culture hero, this article explains how the practice of piracy as well as its criminalization by the Crown in the last decade of the 17th century highlight the emerging tensions between the motherland and her colonies, turning Kidd into an early martyr of the cause of the colonial rebels.

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]

A small but historically important collection of dried plants made over 300 years ago from Western Australia, then known as New Holland, was bequeathed to the University of Oxford in 1728. The collection, the first authenticated and documented record of the Australian flora comprises 26 extant specimens from the continent, many of them associated with published drawings and descriptions. These plants were collected in 1699 by the Englishman William Dampier (1651-1715), one-time pirate turned privateer, navigator and naturalist. Dampier had first visited New Holland in 1688 but did not collect plants on that occasion. However, he did make meticulous observations of the land, sea, winds, peoples, animals, plants, birds, fish, and other 'natural' things recording them in his journal. He was a keen observer and was able to write narratives well. Privateering allowed him to travel the world to 'indulge his curiosity'.1 Dampier's published writings are said to have inspired the most popular works of authors such as Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1726) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798).2 Dampier's accounts also influenced the travels of naturalists such as Mark Catesby (1683-1749), Joseph Banks (1743-1820), Robert Brown (1773-1858) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882). These eminent individuals took copies of Dampier's books on their expeditions. However, the endeavours of Dampier as a pioneering European botanical collector in the Southern Hemisphere are hardly known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States exert their power over maritime predation only occasionally depending on prevalent circumstances. Historically, when states have perceived and attempted to address a problem of piracy, they have encountered severe limits on their abilities to manage private maritime enterprise in waters under their purported control. Despite the popular conception that piracy falls into the legal category of 'universal jurisdiction', such jurisdiction has only been employed sporadically. In reality, despite high-profile 'terror' campaigns against pirates, states regularly employed alternative means of suppression, including negotiation, legal posturing and co-optation. The four articles in this Forum provide detailed case studies of the occasional use of state power to regulate maritime predation in diverse waters and contexts. In these examples, states respectively negotiated with maritime communities in medieval England, sought a monopoly on violence in the South China Sea, collaborated with other states to police colonial Hong Kong, and dealt diplomatically with a local pirate hero to defend New Orleans. Across each article, the 'state' faced a particular problem of piracy, but could only occasionally exert power to manage it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pirate, privateer and smuggler Jean Laffite dominated the mercantile life of New Orleans from 1809 to 1815 by exploiting the limited reach of a weak US government in its attempts to control over the frontier of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Laffite's status as a cultural anti-hero to the majority-French population, who disdained the American government and the war it initiated in 1812, saw much public support for his efforts to evade law enforcement. Such support, however, waned in the face of an overwhelming threat from British invaders in the autumn of 1814. Adept at survival, Laffite reinvented himself as a loyal patriot by contributing vital materiel to the shaky military defence of the city. In doing so, he ensured his freedom and became a hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a myth that endures to this day. His story demonstrates the limits of state power against piratical practices in the nineteenth century, particularly when they occurred on a distant shore, among a population who protected their cherished rogues. [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]

This article examines the impact made by the taking of the ship Madre de Deus in 1592 on the circulation of Asian material culture in England. As a Portuguese cargo ship on its way from Goa, the Madre de Deus was filled with precious and exotic objects – an immense treasure for the English privateers who seized it. An examination of the extensive archival record generated by the ship's capture allows for a reconstruction of the cargo. Probing inventories and other documents for their material and formal qualities as much as for their contents, the article argues that written documents became an instrument with which the English authorities tried to control the uncontrollable movements of the booty. The pathways subsequently followed by some of the items recovered are traced, and the question of how they affected England's artistic culture is addressed. [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]