Pirates_A New History, From Vikings to Somali Raiders by Peter Lehr

Author:Peter Lehr [Lehr, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0300180748
Google: t0WeDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300180748
Goodreads: 41962953
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-06-04T14:24:46+00:00

The Apparent Demise of Piracy

As Britain’s unsuccessful efforts to form a combined Anglo-Dutch-Spanish alliance against Algiers show, the fight against piracy was not just a tactical problem – it was also a political one. As with the modern war against global terrorism, wars on piracy depended on a ‘coalition of the willing’ to be successful. Driven by self-interest, the maritime powers of the day could play very cynical games: an English consul in Syria in 1611 observed that ‘there were difficulties in the way of uniting sovereigns for the suppression of piracy; for some are not displeased that pirates exist and are glad to see certain markets harassed’.212 The French attitude towards multinational operations against the Barbary Coast pirates is telling: in 1729, an anonymous memorandum stated rather bluntly that we ‘are certain that it is not in our interest that all the Barbary corsairs be destroyed, since then we would be on a par with all the Italians and the peoples of the North Sea’.213 This was also one of the main reasons why even the major European military powers acquiesced for so long in the tribute system: paying tribute to the Barbary Coast states was still cheaper than fitting out a naval expedition, while it also gave them a commercial edge over those poorer competitor states that could not afford to pay the tribute – with the result that their ships were regularly attacked.214

Furthermore, ‘the great maritime nations were always suspicious of each other’s intentions and were often reluctant to believe that a proposed attack on the corsairs was not a cover for some other more nefarious activity. Such suspicions were sometimes justified.’215 Regarding the English proposal to Spain for an expedition against the Barbary corsairs at the end of April 1617, British naval historian Sir Julian Corbett wrote that an ‘expedition against the Barbary corsairs became the stock diplomatic formula for covering some ulterior and sinister design’.216 Against the backdrop of this climate of mutual distrust, it is no wonder that most of the proposed alliances against the Barbary corsairs and the ports from which they operated came to naught. Similar considerations also hampered the fight against rampant buccaneering and piracy in the Caribbean, or in the South China Sea where British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonial naval forces each organised their own unilateral anti-pirate patrols in ‘their’ waters, while often clandestinely supporting or at least facilitating piracy in the waters of the others.

Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, this tit-for-tat, mercantile-focused policy had changed – and so had the international landscape. The French occupation of large parts of North Africa was symptomatic of this. Most of the major non-Western powers, that for centuries had posed a formidable challenge to European powers, were on the wane or had already collapsed. Among them were the ‘gunpowder empires’ – the Ottoman Empire (which for that very reason could not come to the rescue of the Barbary Coast states), the Safavid Empire in the Middle East, and the Mughal Empire in South Asia.

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