Buccaneers, Privateers, and Empire

From earliest civilizations of the Middle East and Asia, seaborne brigands have thrived wherever there is trade and states unable to protect transit across the waters and the shores that surround them. Through the ages of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, pirates have menaced the frontiers of empires and even the security of today’s global community.

Yet piracy was neither born in a vacuum nor survived without the support of whole cultures from which it sprang—and that often benefited from its crimes. Beginning in  the reign of King Edward I of England, a form of legalized piracy called privateering was adopted by many weaker nation-states of the Western world as a means of conducting war against an opponent on the seas at minimal expense. Nowhere perhaps, was the prevalence of piracy and privateering as prominent from the 17th through the 19th centuries as in the Americas, where the great wars of empire and revolution unfolded.

How did European powers defend against and eventually utilize piracy in their quest for empire in the New World? How did privateering differ from piracy and how was it effectively employed as a tool for revolution? And why does piracy continue to thrive in our modern world? Donald Grady Shomette, an award-winning author, maritime historian, and marine archaeologist offer answers as he examines this complex and fascinating component of the history of the seas.