Abstract
The purpose of this discussion is to explore the legal perception of maritime piracy, primarily with reference to English source material, during the period 1550–1650. How was piracy characterized and defined as a matter of legal regulation and what was the nature and extent of the enforcement of such law dealing with piracy during that period? The starting point for this enquiry is the conventional legal view of maritime piracy as a distinctive form of criminal behaviour. According to this view, historically piracy has represented an unusual case of personal and individual behaviour directly subject to rules of international as well as national law, as a species of ‘international crime’, the pirate being the ‘enemy of all humankind’ — ‘hostis humani generis’. In accounts of legal history and international law, this categorization has elevated the pirate offender to a special status, as an exceptional and serious kind of criminal, whose behaviour has been subject to universal condemnation — almost a precursor of the archetypal international criminal of the later twentieth century, the war criminal. First this chapter considers the validity of this standard depiction of the pirate as an exceptional type of criminal, before examining in more detail the early modern legal view of piracy. My argument will seek to qualify and clarify what is often understood by the description ‘hostis humani generis’, and then point to the ambivalent view of piratical activity during the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, prior to the much more definite criminalization of piracy at the turn of the eighteenth century.
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Notes
L. Oppenheim, International Law, ed. H. Lauterpacht, 2 vols, 7th edn (London: Longman, 1948), 1, p.559. Oppenheim further defines an international crime as one which ‘either every State can punish on seizure of the criminals, of whatever nationality they may be, or which every State has by the Law of Nations a duty to prevent’, p.307.
There are very few reported cases of criminal prosecutions of pirates in which courts have relied upon universal jurisdiction: see Alfred P. Rubin, The Law of Piracy (2nd edn, Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1998), p. 302;
Eugene Kontorovich, ‘The Piracy Analogy: Modern Universal Jurisdiction’s Hollow Foundation’, Harvard International Law Journal, 45 (2004), 183–92.
See also Lauren Benton, ‘Oceans of Law: The Legal Geography of the Seventeenth Century Seas’, Proceedings of the Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges Conference, 12–15 Feb. 2003, Library of Congress, Washington DC, September 2005, www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/benton.html, at p.11.
See C. Kevin Marshall, ‘Putting Privateers in Their Place: the Applicability of the Marque and Reprisal Clause to Undeclared Wars’, University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997), 953–4;
Kenneth R. Andrews: Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War 1585–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
See Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 69–76.
Barbara Fuchs, ‘Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation’, ELH, 67 (2000) 45.
Grover Clark, ‘The English Practice with Regard to Reprisals by Private Persons’, American Journal of International Law, 27 (1933) 694.
See Donald A. Petrie, The Prize Game: Lawful Looting on the High Seas in the Days of the Fighting Sail (Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999).
Andrews, ‘Elizabethan Privateering’, in Joyce Youings (ed.) Raleigh in Exeter 1985: Privateering and Colonisation in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1985), p.5. See also Claire Jowitt’s Chapter 9, which mentions the use by Clinton Atkinson of letters of marque issued by Don Antonio in 1582.
Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (Yale: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 392.
Daniel Vitkus, ‘Venturing Heroes: Narrating Violent Commerce in Seventeenth-Century England’, Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) Conference Papers, April 2004, www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/emsi/papers, p.16.
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (Yale: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 6.
Matthew Teorey, ‘Pirates and State-Sponsored Terrorism in Eighteenth-Century England’, vols 1, 2 (2003) Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness 53, 55.
G. E. Manwaring and W. G. Perin (eds) The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, 2 vols (London: Navy Records Society, 1920–22), II, p. 18.
See Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970);
John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast: Algiers Under the Turks 1500–1830 (New York: Norton, 1979); Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, pp.44–5, 110–13.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Richard Proudfoot et al., The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Thompson, 1998) I, iii, 31–4. Fernand Braudel refers to Mediterranean piracy during this period as a ‘secondary form of war’ between Christianity and Islam in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1973), II, p.865.
Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, 1625, Book III, Chapter II (New York: Oceana, 1964).
Paul Baepler, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Baepler (ed.) White Slaves: Indian Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). It is estimated for example that there may have been 20,000 Christian captives in Algiers in the 1620s and 1630s.
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
See generally: Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age ( Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983 );
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures; Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 31–79.
Nabil Matar, ‘Introduction: England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577–1704’, in Daniel Vitkus (ed.) Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p.14. See also Nabil Matar’s discussion of Muslim captivity by Christians in Chapter 3 of this volume.
Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 28.
See Ian Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Benton, ‘Oceans of Law’, p.6. See also Franklin Jameson (ed.) Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, Illustrative Documents (London: Macmillan, 1923).
C. L’Estrange Ewen, The Golden Chalice: A Documentated Narrative of an Elizabethan Pirate (privately printed, 1939), p.10; Earle, The Pirate Wars, pp. 19–20.
Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 117.
Evelyn Berckman, Victims of Piracy: the Admiralty County, 1575–1678 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), pp. 11–12.
See Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (New York: Tudor, 1946), p. 104.
See Georg Schwarzenberger, ‘The Problem of an International Criminal Law’, in Gerhard O. W. Mueller and Edward M. Wise (eds) International Criminal Law (New York: Fred B. Rothman, 1965).
See Richard van Dulmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990).
See Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
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Harding, C. (2007). ‘Hostis Humani Generis’ — The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea. In: Jowitt, C. (eds) Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627642_2
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