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Review: Pirates and the Imperial State
Author(s): Marcus Rediker
Review by: Marcus Rediker
Source:
Reviews in American History,
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 351-357
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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PIRATES AND THE IMPERIAL STATE
Marcus Rediker
Robert C. Ritchie. Captain
Kidd and the War against the Pirates. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. vii + 306 pp. Illustrations, maps,
notes, and index. $20.00.
Pirates long ago captured the prize vessel called the Popular
Imagination,
and
they have never lacked historians to tell their tales. John Esquemeling and
Daniel Defoe, contemporaries of Henry Morgan and Blackbeard, initiated an
enduring popular tradition of writing about freebooters, and a truly enor-
mous literature has followed.1 The latest book on this much storied subject
is Robert
C. Ritchie's Captain Kidd
and the War against
the
Pirates, which has all
of the virtues of the very best of the literature on pirates. It has high drama
and genuine adventure; it is vividly written and amply illustrated; it is filled
with rich and particular knowledge-of the world's geography, of nature
(weather and tides), and of maritime lore and technique. And it has much
that other histories of piracy do not: it is based on impeccable scholarship; it
is thoughtful and imaginative in design; and it poses big questions about im-
portant issues, showing how piracy was related to broad social, economic,
and political forces and trends of the seventeenth century. Consequently,
Ritchie's book is not simply a good example of a tradition that has produced
some excellent historical writing; it is, in the end, one of the very best books
ever written about piracy.
The bulk of the study is a many-sided explanation of how William Kidd,
one of history's most notorious pirates, came to a grisly end at Execution Dock
in London in 1701. The story ranges far and wide, from the sailor's rough
world of the Thames waterfront to the charmed circle of high politics at West-
minster, from colonial New York city to the pirate haunt of Saint Marie near
Madagascar.
Along the way Ritchie deftly blends the economic history of the
British empire, the political histories of England and New York, and a less
developed but still important social history of piracy.
William Kidd was born in Greenock, Scotland, around 1645. His first forty
years were unremarkable; he left no mark on the world that has been pre-
served in the historical record. (If he had, we can be reasonably sure that
351
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352 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 1988
Ritchie's thorough research would have found it.) Kidd eventually made his
way to the cockpit of war, the Caribbean, where he joined a mixed French
and English band of privateers. His luck took a good turn in 1689 when he
voyaged to New York and helped to defeat Leisler's Rebellion, thereby win-
ning favor with the new government. Kidd used his new ties to marry well
and to make influential friends such as fellow Scot Robert Livingston. Ever
ambitious, Kidd soon decided that the main chance awaited him in London,
and off he sailed in hope of a privateer's license. He would depend on Robert
Livingston to supply the necessary connections.
In London Kidd and Livingston entered a charged political situation in
which two factions, the Whigs and Tories, waged battle over the scope of
kingly authority and the nature of English foreign and domestic policy. Kidd
hitched his fate to the leadership of the Whig faction, "the Junto,"
which con-
sisted of eminences such as Henry Sidney, first Earl of Romney, Charles Tal-
bot, first Duke of Shrewsbury, Edward Russell, first Earl
of Orford, and John,
Lord Somers -all of whom eventually invested in Kidd's plan to attack and
seize pirate ships in the Indian Ocean.
By the time Kidd reached Madagascar in early 1697 his crew had already
grown restive. The ship was leaky, supplies ran short, and, worst of all, they
had not captured a single prize. Kidd's men began to grumble, wondering
why they could not take the ships of the English East India Company as
prizes. Kidd himself began to doubt his original design to attack pirates who,
after all, fought with undoubted ferocity. Tension aboard the Adventure
Galley
began to mount, as indicated by a fight between Kidd and the ship's gunner,
William Moore, whose skull the captain crushed with a wooden bucket.
Kidd needed a prize quickly, and at last he spied one, a 400-ton ship called
the Quedah
Merchant.
Kidd and his crew took the wealthy vessel in 1698 and
repaired to the island of Saint Marie to divide the booty. There Kidd found
other pirates, to whom he boasted, "he was as bad as they" (p. 116). Many
of Kidd's men thought otherwise and deserted his ship to sail with another
pirate commander, Robert Culliford.
As it happened, Kidd had made a terrible mistake, for the Quedah Merchant
was no ordinary prize. Indeed the ship and its cargo belonged to a leading
member of the Indian emperor's court. Enraged by the news of the capture,
the royal court immediately vented its anger on the East India Company,
rounding up its representatives, closing its factories, and suspending its priv-
ileges.
The East India Company was in no mood for Kidd's antics. Reeling under
the weight of trade depression, French privateering, credit problems, muti-
nies on the ships, and depredations by other pirates, the company was also
under attack at home by merchants who wanted to end its monopoly and by
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REDIKER / Pirates and the Imperial State 353
manufacturers who wanted to bar its import of Indian fabrics. Kidd came "to
personify all of the unknown and unnamed pirates who tormented the com-
pany" (p. 132). The company wanted him hanged, and they had powerful
friends in England who controlled the gallows.
The East India Company proceeded to initiate a broad attack on piracy-
on the settlement at Saint Marie, on cooperation with pirates in the American
colonies, and on Kidd himself as a symbol of their whole bloody mess of a
situation. The ultimate result of their effort was comprehensive new legis-
lation on piracy (11 William & Mary c. 7), institutional reform, and increased
naval policing of the major waterways. The government declared Kidd a pi-
rate and organized an all-out manhunt to bring him to justice.
Meanwhile Kidd's ruffle-wearing patrons in London had fallen on hard
times. The Tories, who favored the East India Company against free traders
and textile manufacturers, attacked the Junto by using Kidd as "a pawn in a
deadly game" of high politics (p. 185). The man who had sought his fortune
through patronage now discovered its dark side. "[S]ome Jonah
or other must
be thrown overboard if the storm cannot otherwise be laid," observed Sec-
retary of State James Vernon. "Little
men are certainly the properest for these
purposes" (p. 192). Kidd was deadweight ballast in a furious squall, and over
the side he went.
Kidd was arrested in New York by a former ally, the Earl of Bellomont,
Governor of the province. He was transported back to London to face charges
of piracy and murder (William
Moore), on which he was quickly found guilty
after a trial in which justice was not blind. (He was, Ritchie argues, guilty in
any case.) He was hanged on May 23, 1701. His gibbeted corpse dangled at
Tilbury point on the Thames until it decomposed beneath the action of the
elements.
Thus ends Kidd's story, but not Ritchie's history, which goes further to
provide an important typology for understanding the evolution of piracy and
its changing relationship to the state in the early modern era. Ritchie outlines
three essential types of piracy. The first was "officially sanctioned piracy"
-
"acts
that are clearly piratical
under any system of law but that go unpunished
because a particular
government finds it convenient to ignore such activities
or even secretly to sponsor them" (p. 11). Prominent examples were Francis
Drake's adventures in the "Spanish Lake" (the Pacific), and indeed almost all
of the raids by the English, French, and Dutch on the Spanish treasure fleet
ever after. These pirates were instruments of empire. Their attacks weakened
Spain's already arthritic
grip on the New World and helped to establish com-
peting national claims. The unofficial violence of piracy served the interests
of England's imperial state.
The second variety was "commercial piracy," organized by merchants or
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354 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 1988
tolerated by entire communities on the periphery of empire, who dealt with
pirates to get scarce hard currency. Frederick Phillipse, one of New York's
wealthiest merchants, took a leading role in provisioning and trading with
pirates off the eastern coast of Africa, while his fellow citizens of New York
(like Bostonians and Philadelphians) welcomed sea robbers who sought to
relieve themselves of their golden luggage.
The third type of piracy was "marauding,"
which had two subtypes. "Or-
ganized marauding" proceeded from a particular base of operations, as on
the "Barbary
Coast" with its "corsair cities" of Tunis and Algeria. Caribbean
buccaneers, originally both hunters and seaborne raiders, attacked the Span-
ish from several well-defended island bases. "Anarchistic marauders" were
pirates who had no regular home base. They "wandered the seas, dividing
and coalescing like amoebas. They lived in small self-contained democracies
that usually operated by majority vote, with the minority asked (or forced)
to leave in order to keep the remaining crew in happy consensus" (p. 25).
Ritchie argues that these types of piracy existed in a general (though over-
lapping) chronological sequence, with officially-sanctioned piracy dominant
between roughly 1570
and 1670, followed by commercial piracy between 1660
and 1700 and anarchistic marauding between 1690 and 1730. The transition
from stages one and two to three-and the state's swift and brutal response
to it-is crucial to Ritchie's argument.
Ritchie shows that Britain's governmental officials and international mer-
chants tolerated, even encouraged piracy as long as it served their interests.
They worried neither about the legality nor the morality of piracy. But when
"anarchistic
marauding"
broke out on a global scale, they decided to eliminate
the piracy they could no longer control. As William Kidd, whose enterprise
began as a kind of commercial piracy (to be carried out, however, against
pirates), moved toward marauding, the state intervened with full force.
The decision was based on England's increasingly global economic power:
"By the end of the seventeenth century England was no longer a brash,
thrusting, new power, but an established and ever more formidable imperial
state" (p. 128). As the English merchant community expanded its share of
international trade, "it looked upon the world with different eyes: it prized
order and regularity because they enhanced profits; disorder interrupted the
regular flow of trade" (p. 128). Suddenly the "roistering buccaneer did not
suit the hard-headed merchants and imperial bureaucrats, whose musty
world of balance sheets and reports came into violent conflict with that of the
pirates" (p. 2). Swashbucklers had helped to build the empire, then to finance
and defend it; they were suddenly redefined as its arch enemies.
In the late seventeenth century the state increased in size, complexity, and
power as wars were fought, trade regulated, bureaucracies formed, inter-
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REDIKER / Pirates and the Imperial State 355
national relations formalized, and decision-making processes centralized.
New institutions were founded to rationalize the trade system and to elimi-
nate the threat of piracy. The Board of Trade was established in 1696, vice-
admiralty courts designed to break the complicity between colonial authori-
ties and sea robbers soon followed, and law promised death to anyone who
cooperated with pirates. The state also began to monopolize the use of vio-
lence, moving away from its earlier reliance on the kind of private force sup-
plied by pirates. The Royal Navy, the longest and strongest arm of state
power, was strengthened further to protect trade from seafaring brigands.
Increased imperial wealth, power, and stability were the primary objectives
of these efforts.
These reforms, initiated in the 1690s, did not produce all of their results
immediately. Piracy
erupted once more, after the War of Spanish Succession.
The state mobilized all of its new resources and succeeded in crushing large-
scale, international deep-sea piracy once and for all. The extermination of
pirates, essentially complete by 1726, "signalled that England had become a
mature imperial power able to exercise its authority throughout the empire"
(p. 236).
Ritchie's insights into these matters are incisive and important, and his ar-
gument is quite convincing. But he should have been more explicit about how
pressures from below caused many of these changes in the nature of the En-
glish state. For it was not simply that the state and merchants lost control of
piracy; it was that another class of men altogether seized
control. The long-
term tendency in piracy
was toward control at successively lower social levels:
the highest functionaries of the state; big merchants; smaller, usually colonial
merchants; and finally the common men of the deep. When this devolution
reached bottom, when seamen (as pirates) organized a social world apart
from the dictates of mercantile and imperial authority and used it to attack
merchants' property (as they began to do in the 1690s), then those who con-
trolled the state resorted to massive violence, both military (the navy) and
penal (the gallows), to eradicate piracy. The social world was one in which
pirates elected their officers, abolished the wage relation, divided their loot
equally, and established a different discipline; it showed that ships did not
have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant shipping
industry and the Royal Navy. The pirates' subversive example fueled the gov-
ernment's repressive campaign.
The irony here is that William Kidd was not a real pirate, at least not in
terms of the egalitarian and democratic traditions maintained by pirates.
Kidd's discipline was too harsh and his own pay (forty shares of booty rather
than the customary two or three) was too great. As one old pirate put it, Kidd
kept "a very different command from what other pirates used to do" (p. 102).
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356 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 1988
Suspended between the great men above and the increasingly powerful com-
mon men below, Kidd was doomed, a man with neither patrons nor com-
rades.
In the early eighteenth century pirates grew even more audacious-in their
attacks on trade (English shipping included, nationalism be damned) and in
their bold utopian efforts to live a freer, more just set of maritime social re-
lations. Simultaneously the English ruling class, Whig and Tory factions alike,
grew more ferocious in its response, drawing upon and continuing the re-
forms of the 1690s and hanging sea robbers by the hundreds.2 The point here
is that the pirates who refused to do the bidding of empire (and chose instead
to do their own) forced what Ritchie describes as a major
reorganization of the
English state. Ritchie might have given more emphasis to the dialectical pro-
cess in which a specific form of class struggle at sea propelled the "moderni-
zation" of the state.
To conclude, Ritchie teaches us that the heroic age of piracy was indeed full
of drama and adventure, but that the war against the pirates was more than
naval chases and broadsides. It was a war of high politics and low, changing
institutions, and imperial relations. The 1690s represented a key moment in
the evolution of English capitalism and imperialism, when the primitive ac-
cumulation of an earlier age gave way to a more predictable and orderly
amassing of capital. The drama of piracy concerned the very future of the
world's economic order.
The relationship between piracy and empire is ancient. Saint Augustine
once remarked on an "apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the
Great
by a pirate who had been seized." When the king "asked the man what
he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold
pride, 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it
with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who do it with a great fleet
are styled emperor."'3 Ritchie
helps us to understand how empire, the biggest
and best organized piracy of them all, won the day.
Marcus
Rediker
teaches
history
at Georgetown University.
He is the author
of Be-
tween the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the
Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987), and co-winner
of the 1988
Merle Curti Award in Social
History presented by the
Organization
of
American
His-
torians.
1. See John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers
of America
(1684; reprint Toronto, 1967); Captain
Charles Johnson [Daniel Defoe], A General
History of the Pyrates, Manuel Schonhorn, ed.
(1724, 1728; 1972). Highlights in the history of piracy include Francis Dow and John Henry
Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630-1730 (1923); Philip Gosse, The History
of Piracy (1932); P. K. Kemp and Christopher Lloyd, Brethren
of the Coast: Buccaneers
of the
South Seas (1960); and Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden
Age of Piracy (1969). A forthcoming work
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REDIKER / Pirates and the Imperial State 357
of great interest will be Joel Baer's The Cruise of the
Fancy: Captain John Avery in Fact and Fiction.
2. The social worlds of buccaneers and pirates are treated in Christopher Hill, "Radical
Pirates?" The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, Margaret Jacob and James Jacob, eds.
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 17-32; J. S. Bromley, "Outlaws at Sea, 1660-
1720: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity among the Caribbean Freebooters," History From
Be-
low: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rude, Frederick Krantz,
ed. (Montreal: Concordia University, 1985), pp. 301-20; Marcus Rediker, "'Under the Ban-
ner of King Death': The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716 to 1726," William and
Mary Quarterly ser. 3, 38 (1981): 203-27.
3. Saint Augustine, The City of God (1950), p. 113.
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