The Pirate Myth by Policante Amedeo

Author:Policante, Amedeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-63252-8
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Part II

Pirate spectres (1800–2012)

Chapter 5

The empire of free trade

Liberal Universalism and the pirate states

According to Diderot, since commerce was ‘the new arm of the moral world’, it was certain one day to become the base of a new world order, which would be based not upon power and plunder but upon an integrated system of competition and market exchange (Pagden 1995: 180). It was a vision shared by most Enlightenment thinkers who believed in the pacifying power of Montesquieu’s ‘doux commerce’ (Dickey 2001: 271–317). Mirabeau’s L’Ami des hommes, for instance, offers us the vision of a future ‘universal monarchy’ founded on a ‘universal confraternity of trade’ (1883: 101). Folded within this modern cosmopolis, a common humanity ‘would work together as a single nation’ (1883: 33), and the power that would have been capable of promoting and protecting this global community united by trade would be the true ‘Friend of mankind,… establishing Universal Peace over the spherical surface of the Earth’ (1883: 97). And yet, according to Mirabeu, this global power would always be forced to maintain its readiness to protect the emergent Universal order from the oppositional forces that might emerge from within. From the perspective of a completely integrated cosmopolis no external enemy could ever exist, and yet military power would be always necessary. An Imperial power should, according to this quintessential representative of the French Enlightenment, remain armed so as to suppress all challenges to the Universal order and, most of all, protect the growth of trade and interdependency. The Imperial power, thus, would not pursue war, and yet it ‘might always be forced to use the Sword to support the common cause’ and force the enemy of humanity to enter the universal confraternity of trade (1883: 103).

By the nineteenth century, Mirabeau’s cosmopolitan dream was largely forgotten. Nevertheless, the advance of industrial capitalism, and the growing commercial integration that followed, fed new cosmopolitan projects. Especially in the British world, classical political economy promoted free trade as a new emancipatory principle that, if embraced throughout the world, would have contributed to the unification of humanity, the growth of international interdependency and, thus, the eventual demise of classical wars between nations (List 1856: 341). In the nineteenth century, following Mirabeau, classical political economy began to promote a vision whose core was the dream that England would be the centre of a cosmopolitan international economy, which would constitute the basis of a Pax Britannica. ‘In the writings of English political economy,’ writes Bernard Semmel, ‘we find a vision that combines the Cobdenite promise of a cosmopolitan world economy and the self-assurance that Britain would have emerged as the metropolis of such a cosmopolis, the “workshop of the world”, the “capital of trade”’ (1970: 151).

In order to realize this vision, it would have been necessary to overcome the resistance of backward groups and uncivilized nations, who continued to oppose commercial integration. The perpetual war for the enforcement of market standards of civilization, therefore, did not stop with the campaign that in the first half of the eighteenth century put an end to the Golden Age of piracy.

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