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Pirates were not positive factors in the economic and political…

- - - - Piracy was outlawed by The Declaration of Paris, in 1856, ratified by various powers. Initially by Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia and Turkey – but not by Spain, Portugal and the USA.
      - The Spanish Armada was assembled by Spain to end British piracy
      - Passing laws was a necessary step, but applying them was much harder, because pirates were notoriously elusive. This lead to the expansion of the British Navy
        
        changing public attitudes, hiring private pirate hunters, rooting out corruption, improving the administration of justice, offering pardons to pirates who voluntarily surrendered, increasing the number of naval ships dedicated to antipiracy duty, cooperating with other nations, convoying merchant ships, blockading and bombarding pirateports, chasing pirates both at sea and on land, and, finally, occupying and dismantling pirate lairs.
    - - Robbery, illegal trading, and coercive practices were familiar strategies for lawful traders during this period, and many of the pirates formerly worked for European governments. In the Indian Ocean, however, the pirates failed to respond to any state authorities.
      - In part looking to eliminate the increasing sponsorship of pirate ships in the English American colonies, the government sent ships in 1698 to end the pirate raids
      - Europeans worried about pirate successes threatening their trading ventures in both oceans, particularly the tenuous hold the trading companies had over commerce, including the lucrative trade in cloth and spices
      - In the British Empire prior to 1700, pirates were dealt with by common-law courts, although not very effectively. Pirates, like modern mafia dons, could often bribe, intimidate, or otherwise suborn jurors in coastal towns, where many locals were connected to this illegal business.
        
        There was also a special Admiralty court in London that could try pirates. But in order be convicted, the pirates had to be transferred for trial to England along with all the necessary evidence and witnesses--a cumbersome procedure in the age of sail.
        
        In order to speed up prosecutions, in 1700 Parliament set up Vice-Admiralty courts that could convene abroad to try pirates.
        
        Defendants were not given any legal representation.
        
        These courts were composed of seven "commissioners," who were drawn from the ranks of naval officers and colonial officials rather than from ordinary judges or jurors
        
        British justice may have been harsh, but it was not inflexible. A pirate could get off, for example, if he could convince the court that he had been coerced into a life of crime.
        
        In order to get pirates to give evidence against their accomplices, authorities relied on incentives, such as the possibility of leniency, along with rewards for informants
      - One commentator of the time estimated that the Pirates did more damage to Pirates shipping than French and Spanish military forces had during the earlier War of the Spanish Succession
- - - - Following the end of state-sanctioned privateering in the Atlantic, Euro-American piracy spread into the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century
      - Beginning in 1696, support for piracy was threatened by Parliament’s efforts to reform the legal and political administration of the colonies.
      - the transformation of law, politics, economics, and even popular culture in a relatively brief period of time soon persuaded landed colonists of the long-term benefits of legal trade over the short-term boom of the pirate market.
      - Support of piracy on the peripheries of the British Empire dates to the first forays of English sea captains overseas. Pirate Nests begins in Elizabethan England with the active protection of piracy by port communities in Devon and Cornwall
      - English pirates almost always had somewhere to go to spend their money, either for a few days or to settle down for good.
        
        The British National Archives holds a petition from 48 wives of known pirates, begging the crown to pardon their husbands so they could return home to care for their families
        
        Returning to London was not an option for most sea rovers, but a life in the American colonies offered the closest proxy
  - - - The shift from trading to governing was not intentional, although it is not true, as one historian famously claimed, that the conquest of India happened by accident
      - The Company constrained British settlement and generally avoided meddling in local religions, since that too would have been bad for business
      - In the early years, it was atrocious. The Company's servants were merchants who found themselves endowed with the authority of government officials. They lacked relevant experience and, faced with a profound conflict between interest and duty, they abused public authority for private gain
      - Because of its mercantile origins as well as a separation of powers forced on it by circumstance, the East India Company was a government of record
      - In some ways, the Company made for a better government precisely because it was a private corporation. The people of India could sue their government in tort or breach of contract a century or more before the people of England; and this was because the government of India was a corporation that could not claim Crown immunity
      - It maintained its own army and navy. It collected taxes and preserved customs barriers. It minted coins and printed stamps. It codified the criminal law, and tried and punished offenders. And in its final years, it started to lay down the public infrastructure - roads, railways and irrigation systems - necessary to support a modem economy.
- - - - The Atlantic, we have come to assume, acted as a natural facilitator of burgeoning European nation-states and their ascendant global economies
      - the English crown gave permits for pirates to operate on high seas. The rise of European powers coincided closely to piracy.
        
        The extent to which Pirates defied the racial hierarchies of their time is up for debate, but there's no quarrel over the serious disruption they caused to the slave trade, which was a huge part of international commerce in the 18th century
      - Throughout the Indian Ocean, the British sought to control the movements of traders, in part through labeling those traders ignoring their laws as pirates
      - India Trading Company
  - - - the growth of new economies
      - the diffusion of bodies and power around the ocean
      - as the circulation of material goods and ideas
- - - - Many European and American pirates joined forces with other piratical groups already operating in the ocean.
    - - Their pirates critique early modern capitalism and challenge oppressive sexual norms
      - They challenge oppressive social hierarchies by flaunting social graces or wearing flamboyant clothing above their social stations
      - They are cast as proto-feminists or supporters of homosocial utopias
      - They subvert oppressive notions of race, citing the presence of black crew members as evidence of race blindness
      - historians' sympathies and biases lead them to sharply different conclusions regarding just how bloodthirsty Pirates really were. Cordingly emphasizes accounts of torture and murder, even those that other historians consider unreliable or exaggerated, while playing down acts of mercy
  - - - safeguarding of the seas during the pirate wars from 1650 to 1850
  - - - Pirates elected their captains, who commanded only during attacks
      - Captains and quartermasters who abused their men or otherwise exercised poor leadership could be and were voted out of office.
      - In an early version of governmental checks and balances, they also elected a quartermaster who supervised such crucial matters as distribution of food, drink, and booty, selection of boarding parties for raids, and enforcement of ship discipline
- - - - The Dutch, despite the competition from the English, French, stend and Scandinavian East India companies, continued to import tea on a large scale in order to help satisfy both their own and the general European demand,
      - Massive boom in dutch east india company between 1734 and 1785
      - Tea, which in the eighteenth century became by far the greatest European export from China, whether in volume or in value, was understandably slower to gain general acceptance in Europe; Although when t did, it more than made up for lost time
      - Tea became the most valuable single commodity in the return argoes of the Dutch East Indiamen from 1729 onwards
      - Established for trade to the east
      - Tea consisted of 70% of their cargo
      - Their competition, the English east india company had cooperated with Chinese mercahnts and government officials in a system that was to last basically unchanged until 1833, despite periodic bouts of mutual exasperation and friction
      - The dutch east india comoany traded with china anyways, importing tea, silks, porcelain and other chinese products on chinese junks.
      - English thought the dutch shouldn’t be trading on direct voyages but instead spread the trade