| Between 1815 and 1830, the western Atlantic experienced a surge in maritime piracy. The United States was confronted with the ancient specter of hostis humani generis, the enemy of all, which threatened the safety and prosperity of the young maritime nation. Questions emerged: Who was responsible for policing international waters? Where and how ought American law be enforced on the open sea? Should all pirates be condemned to death, or should some be spared? What must be done to prevent piracy around the globe? The answers to such questions given by Americans---from Supreme Court justices to local newspaper editorialists---formed an enduring image in public culture of the nation-state's functions and limits, which I call the sovereign imaginary. "Piracy and the American Sovereign Imaginary" considers the relationship between piracy and the sovereign imaginary in early nineteenth-century American public culture. Nineteenth-century piracy is not often studied by scholars of maritime history. This study explores how Americans between 1815 and 1830 experienced piracy as part of their everyday lives, and how those experiences were used to articulate different understandings of state power. Furthermore, analyzing the rhetoric of piracy reveals elements of the sovereign imaginary that continue to haunt American politics, law, and policy in the present. Part 1 compares theories of postsovereignty, or the belief that the power of the sovereign nation-state has begun to wane over the past half-century, with the rhetoric of universal jurisdiction in US pirate law in the nineteenth century. I argue that universal jurisdiction, a legal doctrine allowing any state to prosecute any pirate, reveals strains of postsovereign thought in nineteenth-century American culture that challenge the temporality of postsovereignty theories. Part 2 analyzes the ways in which violence and sovereignty are linked in contemporary theories of the sovereign decision, and subsequently compares those theories to nineteenth-century attitudes toward the use of the pardoning power to save criminals from execution. I argue that the use of the pardoning power in early American piracy cases reveals alternative dispositions of the sovereign decision that aim to save lives from state violence. |
