Black Banners and Letters of Marque: Unlocking the World of Privateers and Pirates in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

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Privately organised warfare was an instrumental component in the creation of European empires, serving military, political, and economic purposes, especially as those empires expanded rapidly in the early modern period. Yet it also posed a key and controversial challenge for imperial governors, who struggled to control private agents and to distinguish between legal privateers and illegal pirates. Focusing on the British empire, my project will explore this complex relationship between private warfare and imperial development by investigating the military and economic roles of privateers, the relationship between piracy, privateers, and wider society, and the emergence of a new imperial policy on privateering through the shifting political circumstances of the early eighteenth century. This topic possesses considerable resonance today because similar applications of private warfare persist in the modern world, such as the employment of security companies in warzones, and so to view historical applications of this practice would produce an interesting discourse.As Edmund Dummer, founder of the West-Indian mail service, stated in 1709, at the height of the global War of the Spanish Succession, 'This cursed trade [privateering] will breed so many pirates that when peace comes, we shall be in more danger from them than we are now from the enemy' (quoted in Cordingly, 2011). Dummer's comment evokes the tensions between the promise and the problems of privateering, and he was proved right: the end of the war in 1713 brought the so-called 'Golden Age of Piracy' that has defined both scholarly discussion and popular imagination of early modern piracy ever since (Rediker, 2004; Cordingly, 2011; Hanna, 2015). Yet the practice of privateering before and during that war has received much less attention from scholars than the piracy that followed it, though it both spurred this later surge in piracy and had broader implications for the development of the British empire, its contemporary impact, and its legacies in the modern world. Privateers were a crucial part of the British empire's strategy, as parliament conceded to mercantile demands and encouraged a privateering fleet to combat the French guerre de course.Historians have written upon the subject for several decades, but few have considered this specific historical moment, tending instead towards broader surveys. David Starkey's influential British Privateering Enterprise (1990) covers a condensed history of the practice from the eighteenth century and beyond, while Janice Thomson (1994) and Lauren Benton (2005) have discussed the broader development of privateering and piracy law on an international and indeed global scale. My project, through a more in-depth analysis of the early eighteenth century as a turning point for privateering and imperial policy, will shed new light on this important subject. This project will incorporate a diverse range of primary sources to analyse privateering from multiple perspectives, including those of imperial governors, colonial society, and privateers themselves; and, while concentrating on the British empire, it will recognise the fundamentally international nature of early modern maritime activity, and will range beyond regional and national boundaries in the selection of source material. The High Court of Admiralty's Prize Papers at TNA will be invaluable for this project, forming its core archival base. These papers document the proceedings of the British prize court, and detail the vessels seized by privateers and taken to British, Irish, Portuguese, and Channel Island ports between 1652 and 1815. I will expand my research beyond the Prize Papers to other HCA series, where these concern privateering voyages, and to legal records from other jurisdictions both in Britain and its colonies; and I will analyse government records and published sources relating to privateering from across this period.