The politics of piracy: A challenge to English law and policy in the Atlantic colonies: 1650--1726

This dissertation examines the transformative effect of colonial piracy on legal relations between the American colonies and the English government in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Recent scholarship has suggested that the Crown seized upon evidence of pirate sponsorship by colonial governments as a pretext for reasserting control, particularly following the establishment of the Board of Trade in 1696. Few historians have engaged the subject of colonial piracy beyond examining the lives and culture of the pirates themselves fewer still have attempted to place the problem of piracy within the context of Crown/colonial legal relationships.While a significant shift in Crown policy did occur, I argue that it does not reflect a burgeoning state extending its prerogative but rather a severely limited state responding to a crisis in its relations with the colonies. Far from pretext, the reality of pirate sponsorship posed a serious breach in almost every sphere of contact between England and America: economic, social, political, and legal. The widespread and longstanding accord between Atlantic pirates and colonial administrators collided with the mercantilist policies of a new English bureaucracy, leading to a decades-long struggle over charter rights, trade relations, and the pursuit of English justice in its dominions. The ultimate result of this conflict was twofold: a vastly more intrusive and engaged Crown and, conversely, an independent American legal identity.The methodology of research for this dissertation combines extensive examination of colonial archival records, collected papers, transatlantic correspondence and British governmental materials with a thorough study of current historiography on piracy, colonial law and commerce, English statebuilding, and other related fields. This allows for a detailed consideration of how piracy affected legal norms on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as relations between the two.