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Discourses of Piracy in an Age of Revolutions

Simon Layton

Itinerario / Volume 35 / Issue 02 / August 2011, pp 81 - 97

DOI: 10.1017/S0165115311000301, Published online: 18 November 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115311000301

How to cite this article:

Simon Layton (2011). Discourses of Piracy in an Age of Revolutions. Itinerario, 35, pp
81-97 doi:10.1017/S0165115311000301

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 81

Discourses of Piracy in an Age of Revolutions

SIMON LAYTON*

Introduction

The stigma of piracy, writes Sugata Bose, has provoked heated historical and
political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and sub-
stance.1 As a stigma, it has not only misrepresented the morality and motives of
so-called pirates, but has also succeeded in ascribing an air of criminality to their
activities, in an absence of any law that would actually have made it so. Moreover,
recounting the spectacles of piracy in world history once nourished a faltering vision
of imperial triumph, in which the maritime violence of empires, particularly the
British Empire, was seen to be a wonderful thing.2 Since then, naval history has run
aground, while other historians have begun to confront some of the questions head
on: what is a pirate, and what made its violence illegitimate relative to the power
of sovereign states?3 Most important to the present article is questioning how pira-
cy developed into a central pillar of maritime-imperial expansion. Was it, as Bose
suggests, part of a wider extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism4 within the
Indian Ocean arena, or was it merely an oppositional fantasy that legitimised sea
power against a ubiquitous and ill-defined foe?
It is not the purpose of this article to strip pirates of their Ciceronian brand as
hostes humani generis, only to have them play the role of righteous resistance.
That, to my mind, would be capsizing the discourse, succumbing to a pole-shift of
legitimacy whilst upholding an abstract uniformity across both time and space. The
increasing sophistication of historical scholarship, on the regions in which pirates
were variously encountered, now renders any attempt to construct piracy within a
singular ideological framework possible, perhaps, but extremely difficult.5 Lauren
Benton has been successful in presenting the pirate identity as a fluid legal con-
structa state of interplay (rather than exception), in which pirates acted as
lawyers arguing on behalf of their own legitimacy.6 But as such, they were internal
to empire, already subject to its authority before having to negotiate their position
within it. The Indian Ocean voyages of Henry Avery and William Kidd, for example,
epitomised the way ships made an easy and reversible transition from being
vectors of law to ones of lawlessness. In preying on the wealth of the hajj, these
figures exacerbated the Companys subservient relationship with the Mughal

Itinerario volume XXXV, issue 2, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0165115311000301

82 SIMON LAYTON

emperor, and this, in turn, forced the Crown to define and suppress piracy in the
Atlantic and Caribbean.7 Here we might see a system of piracy, characteristic of the
Atlantic world, spilling over into the western Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth
century. Declaring the slave-trade to be piracy, argued Viscount Palmerston,
would be useful in stigmatising the crimeby an infamous designation.8 It was a
purely philanthropic subject which just happened also to give the Royal Navy the
right to search virtually any vessel suspected of harbouring slaves, as if it belonged
to no state at allor the maritime state of exception. By 1851 nearly all the civili-
sed states except Persia had assented, defining slave-trading as a kind of piracy.
Only the Qajar Shah was reluctant to deliver over to the British Government the
control of his subjects in the maritime ports of Persia. The more this question was
pressed, he explained, the greater were their alarm and doubt what the real object
of the English Government could be.9
Unlike Benton, Bose joins Lakshmi Subramanian, myself and others in a concern
with what we might call piracy of the encounter. The seafaring communities of the
nineteenth-century Arab and Malay worlds, especially, represented an external
confrontation with European authority, where and when it was, in Bentons words,
thrust into ocean space.10 However, that such encounters took place amid the
fervent forward-thinking of the Age of Revolutions suggests that the resulting
discourse did not simply ride atop successive waves of European imperialism from
the Portuguese period onward, as Bose suggests. Rather, it strengthens a feeling
Ashin Das Gupta once had, of an altered character of the Indian Ocean, marked
by a kind of collective European amnesia. By the late eighteenth century, No one
remembered that not many decades ago it was difficult to say on sight whether a
ship on the Indian Ocean was European or Asian.11 Relative parity gave way to an
overbearing maritime presence, and did not take long to be forgotten.
Indeed, as Uday Singh Mehta has skilfully contended, a liberal-imperial discourse
soon had an imagined Orient locked into a state of civilizational infantism. In this
way, the British were able to construe their own seaborne violence as a force for
modernity, at the same time as they consigned those who challenged their legitima-
cy to a bygone era. But there were other aspects, too, which cast piracy into a
mould of backward civilisation and invalid politics. This article is an attempt to
understand the discourse of piracy on its own terms, by exploring some of these key
features, as British imperial power navigated the great arc of Asian trade12 in a
global revolutionary age.

Constructing the Piratical:

Timelessness and Geography, Race and Religion
From the late eighteenth century, Britons in the east came to regard their empire
as the guardian of Indian Ocean trade, working towards the commercial enlighten-
ment of backward peoples. European exceptionalism was enshrined and codified,
and reflected back into the imperial arena in the guise of paternalism, protection
and improvement. Let India but be civilized, wrote the Scottish pamphleteer David
Laurie, and we have at once direct and complete access to all the wealth and com-
merce of the whole Eastern world.13 While wartime imperatives had reinforced and
given greater urgency to the suppression of piracy, this outlived the French threat
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 83

with a new ethos of responsibility, to advance the world according to newly dis-
covered and universally applicable laws of progress.
The alternative seemed to be a destructive stasis. For Thomas Stamford Raffles,
piracy was at once timeless, shrouded in a culture of ignorance, and changeable, if
only by force:
The prevalence of piracy on the Malayan coasts, and the light in which it
was viewed as an honourable occupation, worthy of being followed by
young princes and nobles, is an evil of ancient date, and intimately con-
nected with the Malayan habits. The old Malayan romances, and the frag-
ments of their traditional history, constantly refer with pride to piratical
cruizesThe practice of piracy is now an evil so extensive and formidable,
that it can be put down by the strong hand alone.14
When Jonathan Duncan, governor of Bombay from 1795, put forward the case for
sending a force to burn or destroy all the southern Pirates[] vessels at Malvan,
within the kingdom of Kolhapur (on the southernmost coastal point of todays state
of Maharashtra), he justified his recommendation in similar terms, adding also a
sense of financial anxiety typical of the Companys higher ranks:
there is little or rather no probability that the Rajah [of Kolhapur] will ever be
able tolodg[e] any creditable security against the return of his people to
a practice to which they and their fore fathers were known to have been
evinced since the earliest mention of that well known pirate coast, in
general history, which will consequently require the continuance of our
blockade of his Ports,...at a greater expence [sic] than the Court of Directors
deserve to incur.15
Looking north to Gujarat, and the inveterate Pirates issuing from the indomitable
Gulf of Kutch, the governor merely repeated himself. Nothing short of taking
permanent possession of their principal stronghold on the island of Betthe seat
of Krishnas terrestrial abode, widely regarded as the fourth holiest centre of Hindu
pilgrimagewould ever deter them from their plundering ways.
[They] are believed in the faith of history to have so continued for such a
course of ages, that effectually to guard against their more than probable
recurrence to such acts,...can we conceive be effected by no means short
of taking possession of their Island.16

These images of timelessness are best understood in conjunction with what

Sudipta Sen has called the new imperial geography, in which expansion and
dominion were observed within cartographic representations of orderly, recognis-
able spaces, admixed with a cultural penchant for emotive visual imagery.17 The
post-Enlightenment project of ordering the world led to a kind of geographical
determinism that explained piracy in terms of its environment, and thus made expli-
cable its assumed permanence as a feature of eastern littorals. In 1828, a Company
registrar at Singapore was sure to link Southeast Asias geography with the time-
less piratical culture that resulted from it:
The most casual view of a Chart of these Seas is sufficient to convince any
84 SIMON LAYTON

one that no part of the globe is more favourably adapted for the secure and
successful practice of Piracy, and when to these natural facilities are added
the concurring habits and disposition of the Natives, which inhabit these
Islands, we shall scarcely expect to find it less flourishing here than in the
states of Barbary. From the earliest times of which we have any record of
these Countries piracy has been a distinguishing feature in the Character of
the Malays.18

The swirling waters of the Gulf of Kutch heaved and overflowed in the wet season,
and exposed numerous sandbanks as waters flooded out again when fair, and on
several occasions frustrated the Companys attempts to send a show of force. It was
also observed that the arid salt-marshes surrounding the Gulf precluded agri-
cultural production, the implication being that coastal Gujaratis were inclined to
pursue piracy due to a paucity of natural resources.19 The Bombay Governments
blockade of the Gulf sought to induce a rapid improvement of the state of
Civilization, and in 1813 Duncans successor, Evan Nepean, was pleased to report
a marked increase in grain production. As he told the Court of Directors,
these happy effects are to be attributed, in a great degree, to the persever-
ing efforts of this Government, in the suppression of Piracy; and thus ren-
dering it necessary that the persons engaged in these nefarious proceed-
ings, should have recourse to a different mode of life, to provide for their
subsistence.20
Piracy was thus pitted against a new structure of trade, in which littoral communi-
ties could be denied a maritime role and instead pushed into primary production in
areas outside of British control. A similar effort was made by the Dutch in the
1820s, when they attempted to settle sea-roving chiefs in the Moluccas, in the
hope that they would turn to agriculture.21
Furthermore, such images of timelessness and geography exhibited a perma-
nence of their own. The development of the idea of pirate coasts accompanied
much maritime expansion in the Indian Ocean world, and was continually rein-
forced in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography. For example, Bose
draws attention to Charles Belgraves 1966 work, The Pirate Coast, which docu-
ments British antipiracy campaigns in the Persian Gulf from the perspective of
Captain Francis E. Loch, who commanded the Eden against Ras al-Khaima in
1819. The waters off the Omani coast, Belgrave wrote, were as hostile as those who
sailed them: an ideal place for sea-robbers[,]studded with little islands, indented
with narrow, twisting creeks, protected with treacherous sand banks, and jagged
coral reefsoften only a few feet below the water level.22
Local knowledge of such conditions, and the ability to construct well-suited, shal-
low-draft vessels, was essential to piracys success. It also contrasted sharply with
an acute lack of European knowledge. The commanders of the 1809 expedition to
Ras al-Khaima, which was ultimately considered a failure, were unaware that the
greater part of the Qasimi fleet was safely hidden in the uncharted western inlets of
the Musandam Peninsula.23 Major Alex Walker, Resident at Baroda, claimed that
even direct conquest of the Kutch ports would hardly deter the pirates there; what
was needed was an exhaustive survey of the various and intricate Creeks and
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 85

mouths to the Indus, where local seafarers could find easy refuge whenever polit-
ical tides turned against them.24 Even as late as 1843, when Captain Henry Keppel
of the HMS Dido reached the mouth of the Sarawak to support James Brookes pri-
vate Raj in Borneo, he was amazed to have actually sailed by the best Admiralty
chart eighty miles inland, and over the tops of mountains!25 In 1837, the Royal
Asiatic Society in London reflected upon the Bombay Marines proud history of
fighting piracy in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, and celebrated the geographic
knowledge that had thusly accumulated (a survey of the Gulf was completed in
1828, thanks in large part to the expedition against Ras al-Khaima in 1819). The
friends of science, the Society proclaimed, owed a debt of gratitude...to this dis-
tinguished body of men.26
While it was the pirate-hunters of Crown and Company militaries that filled in
many of the maps eastern edges well before others had the chance to paint them
pink, the friends of science themselves fuelled the discourse of piracy in other
ways. William Jones, for example, found a place for piracy in his celebrated dis-
covery of a shared ancestry of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. He postulated that the
Romani gypsies of Europe, whose language revealed an Asian past, had perhaps
descended from the ancient seafarers of Sind. [I]n some piratical expedition, he
reasoned, they may have landed on the coast of Arabia or Africa, whence they
might have rambled to Egypt, and at length have migrated, or been driven into
Europe.27 Shruti Kapila has argued that this was a period in which theories of race
and biological inheritance emerged as the co-accomplice to what she calls the
classical modes of differentiating Europe from the peoples inhabiting its colonial
spheres. [L]inguistic and civilisational analysis, she contends, was not an alter-
native to racial theorising but part of the same intellectual project.28
Thus, for Jones, pirates and gypsies may well have shared an inherited cultural
predisposition to rambling, whether on land or at sea. Certainly, as British rule
consolidated in the subcontinent, piracy took its place among several subversive
forms of nomadic and semi-nomadic behaviour. The thagi, for example, were said
to be a criminal caste of roving, Kali-worshipping stranglers. Discovered in
1807, and avowedly practising the profession of their forefathers, they were zealous-
ly hunted down by W.H. Sleeman in the 1830s.29 Kim Wagner notes that the dis-
course of thagi (or thuggee) was similarly founded upon an underlying sense of
geographical determinism. Theirs was a world of bandit territory as traditionally
described by historians: located on a narrow tract of land between two rivers and
intersected by labyrinthine ravines...at the intersection of natural and state bor-
ders.30 We might also look to Mountstuart Elphinstones celebrated treatise on the
Pashtun, whom he compared to the highlanders of his native Scotlandboth were
wild tribesmen born of rugged terrain and a harsh environment.31 But it is the
criminal caste, typified by thagi, which best represents piracys territorial equiva-
lent in the British imperial imagination. Indeed, the association proved quite contin-
uous, lasting well into the era of eugenics in the early twentieth century. It was made
explicit, for example, in W.J. Hatchs 1928 work, The Land Pirates of India, which
accused the Kuraver people in southern India of a similar racial predisposition to
criminality. Theft, he explained, was a matter of birth and blood, not of profession
or occupation, although they apparently did not possess that flattened head, with
ears low down and long, which suggests the criminal.32
86 SIMON LAYTON

Racial typologies of piracy proper impacted upon the discourse from an early
stage. While there is no question that encountering piracy in Asian waters prompt-
ed some to think of and describe races of pirates as early as the late eighteenth
century, what this meant exactly is unclear. The language of inheritance and
descent was frequently employed, and one can observe an increasing emphasis on
the biological throughout the early nineteenth century. Brooke, for example, writing
in the 1840s, considered that the people of the river Kuti (the worst and strongest
river in all Borneo) were chiefly a mixed race of the Bugis and Malays, fierce,
courageous, powerful, and piratical.33 On the one hand, to his mind, the Bugis
were a virtuous people, adept at both seafaring and commerce; it was the lawless
ferocity of the Malays that, through their interbreeding, made them a very differ-
ent people. He also distinguished between land and sea dyaks in his own
country of Sarawak, and felt that those of the interior were one of the most inter-
esting and easily to be improved races in the world, while the predatory tribes of
the coasts...are great pirates and head-hunters.34 He also conceived of numerous
and variegated inland races, the lowest grade being little better than monkeys,
who live in trees, eat without cooking, [and] are hunted by other tribes.35 Though
Brooke was not a man of science, he sustained a commitment to those who were,
and in the 1850s became a regular host for Alfred Russel Wallace as he developed
his Sarawak Law regarding the geographic proximity of related species.36
In Gujarat, it was the rigid British understandings of caste, more than race, which
explained piracy as a feature of backward civilisation. Hinduism was associated with
a raft of supposedly irrational cultural practices, which were seen to corrupt social
orders and impede regular commerce. Captain Seton, the acting envoy to Kutch,
couched his report on piracy with several references to local superstitions. He was
amused to find in 1802 that some inhabitants (possibly Jains) of the holy town of
Dwarka refused even to air out their bedding, for fear of disturbing the vermin.
Though backward in their beliefs, such pacifists were not the pirates he was look-
ing for; only a certain portion of Dwarkas seafarers subsisted by the exercise of
Piracy and the Fruits of Superstition. While Seton had learned that the present
head man was of the cast of Manac or what is called with us the...Fisherman
Cast, he explained how the religious prejudices of the other inhabitants not
permitting gaining of their livelihood from fishing, they are forced to subsist by
piracy.37
Beyond the subcontinent, it was Islam that occupied a special place within British
explanations of piracy. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period in which
reading publics became enthralled by events in the Mediterranean, as tales of
Barbary piracy, Moorish captivity, and the struggle for Greek independence circulat-
ed in the pages of the popular press. In the western Indian Ocean as well as in
Southeast Asia, Islam was seen as a corrupting force that encouraged both piracy
and the slave trade, inhibited the productive impulses of society and reinforced
despotic forms of political power. Raffles saw the intolerant spirit of the religion
of Islam as being a major stimulus for piracy in Southeast Asia, inhibiting inland
inhabitants from bring[ing] the produce of the interior down the innumerable
rivers, and communicat[ing] to countries beyond the reach of foreign adventurers
the comforts of civilised life.38 He viewed the inculcation of Islam as top-down, and
chiefly the domain of a politically powerful, proselytising minority:
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 87

The Arab Sheikhsnever neglected to enforce the merit of plundering and

massacring the infidels; an abominable tenet, which has tended more than
any other doctrine of the Kran to the propagation of this religion.
Numerous and various are the tribes of the Eastern Isles which have not
embraced the religion of Islam to this day, and consequently are reckoned
infidels: cruizes against such were, and are, constantly certain of receiving
the approbation of all the Arab teachers settled in the Malayan countries.39

Similarly, in the Persian Gulf, it was the new tenets of Wahhabism that were seen to
impart a particular viciousness to piracy in the region. J. B. Kelly quotes an officer
of the Bombay Marine, who gave the following account:
I must confess, with a people who are not naturally cruel, I am somewhat
surprised they should have adopted the savage and revolting principle of
sacrificing their captives. They did so with circumstances of horrid solem-
nity, which gave the deed the appearance of some hellish religious rite. No
injunction to such an effect exists, however, in the otherwise fanatical faith
they avow. After a ship was taken, she was purified with water and with per-
fumes; the crew were then led forward singly, their heads placed on the
gunwale, and their throats cut, with the exclamation used in battle of Allah
akbar!God is great!40

James Silk Buckingham, too, described the Qawasim as previously peaceable,

honest seafarers before their conversion. As he wrote in his acclaimed travel narra-
tive:
They obeyed the call with all the enthusiasm which new religions are so fre-
quently found to inspire, and...directed their views to war and conquest;
their leaders easily persuaded them that God was on their side, and that
therefore the legions of hell itself could not prevail against them;war and
plunder was the universal cry, and destruction to infidels was vowed in the
same breath that uttered the name of their merciful Creator[A]s the sea
was still before them, like the great high-way of nations on which men of
every faith and denomination had hitherto passed unmolested, they deter-
mined to reap the harvest of their toils on what might be termed in every
sense their own element.41

Islam was seen to be a contributory factor to the piracy of these regions, but at the
same time was an invasive force. Its corruptive influence seemed to work in con-
junction with naturally supportive environments, and the characteristic predisposi-
tions of downtrodden and backward peoples. Brooke found solace in his belief
that the dyaks observation of Islam seemed to consist of little more than rejecting
the use of pork.42 He balked at the thought of a red hot missionary crusade enter-
ing Borneo, but felt that if his position in Sarawak could attract a mission of rea-
sonable and educated menwho hold civilisation and education as a means of reli-
gion,then the sooner they come the better.43
88 SIMON LAYTON

Visions of Despotism:
Piratical States and the Limits of Definition

Suppressing piracy with military force relied, above all, on two paradoxes. First, the
assumed apolitical character of maritime space, supported by the arguments of
mare liberum, assured the British of the legitimacy of their own violent actions
upon it. Second, and more importantly, pirates were defined in the Atlantic-world
tradition as economically-driven individuals, operating beyond the boundaries of
sovereign authority. Visions of despotism (and its correlative opposite, anarchy)
convinced imperial agents that entire seafaring communities could be bereft of
political authenticity, and were therefore deserving of wholesale extirpation. In the
1790s, the radical utilitarian, William Godwin, argued that The inhabitants of coun-
tries in which despotism is complete, are frequently but a more vicious species of
brutes. Oppression stimulates them to mischief and piracy, and superior force of
mind often displays itself only in deeper treachery, or more daring injustice.44
James Brooke would surely have agreed:
These innocent savages, of course, have the properties of human nature
fully developed and displayed. As a whole, with power, they are violent,
blood-thirsty, treacherous, and lying; and to manage them by moral means
alone, is like putting milk and water on a sloughing ulcer.Half measures
will fail. A savage must be subjected first to order, and then afterwards you
may pet him a littleLet saints talk of mercy; but there is no mercy in half
measures.45
In this view, the distribution of power within a given political system bore direct influ-
ence upon the character of those over whom it purported to rule. Changing such
structures, however, thus seemed a logical step towards enlightening backward
societies. Godwin equated the Indian caste system with the kind of rigid social hier-
archy experienced by Europeans in feudal times, from which the latter had pro-
gressed from barbarism to refinement.46 Europe had thus already experienced the
civilising process, but the process had not been pleasant. [T]he passage is long
and arduous, he wrote, and, if we aspire to the final result, we must submit to that
portion of misery and vice, which necessarily fills the space between.47
Many of those who participated in the suppression of piracy were thus resigned
to the idea of extirpation. As John Ravenshaw, a Cambridge-educated revenue col-
lector in the Konkan put it, it may be deemed expedient to take immediate meas-
ures to compel these robbers to desist from their present views, if not totally to anni-
hilate them.48 If this seemed far-fetched at the turn of the century, thirty years later
it seemed, to some, a standard course of action. In 1836, the boats of the
Andromache fell-in with 130 suspected pirates near the known haunt of Gallang,
southwest of Riau. It took several hours to destroy the three large prows, but once
their crews had taken to the water, the work of slaughter began, with muskets,
pikes, pistols, and cutlasses. I sickened at the sight, recalled General MacKenzie,
but it was dire necessity.49 It ought also to be noted that there was some degree
of financial incentive to such massacres. A year after this encounter at Gallang, a
talented naval officer by the name of Henry Chads demonstrated that the crime of
piracy existed equally in eastern seas as in the west, when the Admiralty awarded
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 89

him head money for the capture of nine Malays in the Straits of Malacca.50
Because of a legislative incentive enacted in 1825, aimed at securing the Caribbean
during Latin Americas wars of independence, officers and crews were to be person-
ally rewarded for the capture or killing of sailors caught in the act of piracy. Nine
years later, however, the commander of the Samarang was awarded twelve thou-
sand pounds for killing 350 suspected pirates in the Mollocus, after determining
their hostile intent.51
As imagined piratical communities, the British denied the political authenticity
of all maritime resistance in Southeast Asia. But paradoxically, they actively sought
out potentates who could be made to answer for their mobile subjects. As Rear-
Admiral Edward Owen wrote from the Southampton, off Penang in 1830, nothing
can enable us to check that Spirit of Piracy which seems the innate principles of
these people effectually; unless we do obtain an influence with their chiefs and
make it their duty to suppress it.52 The merchants of Singapore, too, recommend-
ed to the government that threatening letters be written to all the neighbouring
Rajahs and Chiefs who are suspected of aiding, encouraging and protecting
pirates.53 In India, there was by this time a well-established tradition of chastising
rulers seen to be aiding and abetting pirates. In 1805, for example, a 32-gun fifth-
rate frigate was sent to Bet to demand the restoration of some plundered Surat
merchandise. Captain Dobby sent an officer up to the fort with this message:
If you refuse this just and equitable demand I shall immediately consider &
treat you as an enemy. I have ordered the Officer who will deliver this to you
to wait 2 hours for your answer which I hope & trust will be satisfactory, if it
is not I shall immediately commence hostilities and all the blood that is
shed & damage done to your town and Temples will rest on your head.54
Even when piracy was not seen to be under the direct control of a recognised
potentate (in this case, Duncans administration expected the plunder to have
already dissipated throughout the region), piracy was nevertheless seen as a
product of corrupt rule and misgovernment.
Joan-Pau Rubis argues that non-European barbarism came to be primarily
determined by neither race nor religion, but by the relation between civility and pol-
itics.55 In the eighteenth century, particularly through the Aristotelian reflections of
Montesquieu, concepts of oriental despotism emerged as a mode of reference for
debating the political structures within Europe. However, as Rubis is concerned to
show, its theoretical development (which he places between 1580 and 1750) can
only be fully understood in the context of direct European encounters with the
Orient they objectified.56 While the spatial and temporal conceptions outlined
above contributed heavily to the reading of backwardness into encountered lit-
toral cultures, it was the political economy championed first by Adam Smith in
Wealth of Nations (1776) that established a new place for piracy in British imperial
ideology. That piracy was inherent in individuals as well as a symptom of wider polit-
ical immorality, was a strange contradiction within the discourse of piracy; but
during the revolutionary age, economic liberalism brought both to bear against the
pillars of British imperial rule. To many, the East India Company was one of the
most powerful of all the various Rulers of the Despotic East,57 while piracy was its
kindred evil.
90 SIMON LAYTON

Those who espoused free trade across the British mercantile map of Asia also
ultimately repositioned ideas of piracy within wider discourses of despotism and
civilisation. Their opposition to monopoly, in particular, was framed within a new
vocabulary of rights which construed the old mercantilist system as an abhorrent
conflation of incompatible economic and political interests. Like monopoly, piracy
was an economic crime that used coercion and violence to deny free individuals the
right to trade. Buckingham (who is quoted depicting Wahhabi pirates above) was a
leading radical publicist twice deported from India for his alleged libel against the
Companys governing elite. As he saw it, the Company had no interest in safeguard-
ing liberty, whether on land or at sea. Looking to the plight of Singapores
merchants, he asked:
Why is it that the supreme rulers of these seas, the Dutch and English
monopolists, do not extinguish these hordes of savages, who live by mur-
der and rapine? The large Indiamen are too strong to incur any danger from
the attacks of Malay prows, which are suffered to prey on the weaker mer-
chantmen; becoming thus useful allies to the monopolists, who would be
glad to see every ship driven off the ocean but their own.58
Free trade offered an equality of means that would see the most enterprising justly
rewarded, to societys collective long-term benefit. For Buckingham, the suppres-
sion of piracy had more to do with worldview than trade; it concerned the right to
trade, rather than the material need to protect property. Singapores rise, and the
Companys demise, put the empire at the forefront of Britains liberal turn. By the
time it reached its domestic apex in the 1840s, one quixotic visionary had already
taken it upon himself to extirpate the last obstacles to a new world-economic order.
James Brooke entered Borneo in 1839, as a private adventurer on board his 40-
tonne schooner, the Royalist. Helping to suppress a rebellion against the Sultan of
Bruneis uncle, he was rewarded with the country of Sarawak, on Borneos north-
west coast. He therefore legitimised the authority of his raj by deferring, at least ini-
tially, to the title bestowed on him by the Sultan. He was not answerable to the
Crown. As he explained to his friend in London, in 1843: If it be as I wish, I shall
rest under the shadow of the British Government; otherwise, I shall have the pleas-
ure of plucking up my energies, and developing the country as I can.59 He believed
that if a set of laws, cut and dried ready for the natives, was introduced, it would
be comprehensively rejected. Governments, like clothes, will not fit everybody, and
certainly, a people who gradually develop their government, though not a good one,
are nearer happiness and stability, than a government of the best, which is fitted at
random.60 Brooke hoped his coast of Borneo would become a new commercial
and political hub, complementing rather than rivalling Singapore, which could
influence and amend the entire Archipelago.61 Raffles was the high authority for
most matters concerning his own governing philosophy, and making the seas safe
for the kind of commerce he envisaged quickly became his first and greatest obsta-
cle.62 What piracy actually was seemed to him a simple question:

The piracy of the Archipelago is not understood; folks, naval officers in par-
ticular, talk about native states, international law, the right of native nations
to war one on another, &c., &c.; and the consequence is they are very reluc-
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 91

tant to act, because they cannot distinguish pirate communities from native
states[;] I would punish them if they dared to seize a trader on the high
seas.63

Though his power was admittedly despotic, he took his war to the pirates on what
he saw as their terms. I am a civilised savage, he wrote, with so little law that
you might hang me! before I knew that I had done wrong.64 On the eve of storm-
ing Brunei, on-board the aptly named naval steamer Phlegethon,65 he confided in
his best friend in London:
I do not quite agree in our usual mode of treating these pirates, for I would
always treat them like gentlemen, and rarely...subject them to a judicial
proceeding. If they yielded without resistance, I would in most cases let
them go[;]...but if they resisted, if they only fired or stabbed once, I would
put them all to death[.]...This mode of proceeding would save a world of
trouble, and all the delays and forms of your darling mistressthe law
which was certainly never framed for the existing state of society, on the
northwest coast of Borneo.66
The politics of piracy were, for Brooke, axiomatic, and from as early as 1842, he
had resolved to separate the piratical communities from the peaceable ones.67
While the neighbouring Sarebas were a powerful, wild, and piratical tribe, the Sulu
archipelago to the northeast was comprised of powerful piratical nations. Even his
allies in Borneo were suspected of concealing deeply seated piratical inclinations.
When an uncle of the Sultan, Muda Hassim, invested Brooke with his Raj in the first
place, he expressed his misgivings to his mother: that he is a very weak, and a very
indolent man I know, and perhaps he wants to throw me overboard if he dare; but
still I hope better things, and if promises could satisfy, and oaths assure, I have plen-
ty.68 When, in 1846, the Sultan proclaimed himself a pirate by assassinating the
pro-British faction in his court (including Muda Hassim), Brooke resolved to
[d]estroy Brun, depose the sultan, disperse the population, [and] never allow the
place to be rebuilt.69 Within three months, Brooke had stormed Brunei with naval
assistance, and put the Sultan to flight. I no longer own his authority, or hold
Sarawak under his gift, he wrote.70
Three years later, Brooke was joined by the Royal Navy once more (this time
under William Farquhar of the Albatross), in another action against his neighbour-
ing tribe, the Sarebas. In their capital, they had hung a basket ready to collect the
white Rajahs head, and put to sea apparently intent on storming the Sarawak.
Ambushing them at the mouth of their own river, though, in a short space of time
the Sarebas prows were destroyed by multiple broadsides.71 To quote Richard
Cobden as he described the scene to the House of Commons, the steamer
Nemesis was then driven among the boats, and the miserable creatures were
crushed under the paddle wheels, and annihilated by the hundreds in the most
inhuman manner.72 Mincemeat was Brookes term.73
Parliament had been increasingly attentive to Brookes attempts to extirpate the
pirates from the Borneo coast ever since he had acquired the island of Labuan on
the Crowns behalf in 1846, to be used as a coaling station for steamers en route
to China. Public interest had grown too, and when news of the Battle of Batang
92 SIMON LAYTON

Marau (as Singapores press dubbed it) reached London, groups such as the
Aborigines Protection Society spearheaded an unprecedented popular outcry.74 At
a conservative estimate, around eight hundred of the Sarebas had been killed, while
Brookes side suffered two natives killed and about six wounded.75 Brooke himself
deplored the clamour raised by the humanity-mongers, but when Lucky
Farquhar (as one senior officer described him)76 filed a claim for the head money
owing to him for the attack, the oppositions radical fringe in the House of
Commons could now denounce Brooke on behalf of the taxpayer.
With Farquhars claim, for the destruction of eight hundred pirates and their
entire fleet, the Crown was obliged to pay nearly a hundred-thousand pounds to the
crews of Albatross and Nemesis.77 In 1850, the so-called Head Money Act was
quietly repealed.78 The definition of piracy, it seems, had by mid-century been
stretched to its reasonable limits. For Brooke, shaken by novel accusations of
crimes against humanity, it was the Navy, not Londons political establishment,
which had the final say in the matter. As he wrote to his uncle, Major Charles Stuart:
The pirate question which provoked and vexed me, is set at rest by the decision of
the Admiralty Court. They are pirates, and this must justify all I have done, and
more in the eyes of reasonable men.79

Conclusion
The discourse of piracy that emerged in the Age of Revolutions depended funda-
mentally upon interrelated assertions of its universality, its timelessness and inher-
ence. As recognised political communities, pirates indeed symbolised anticolo-
nial resistance; but such a generalisation only stands firm in relation to the dis-
courses role in reflecting back upon new modes of political and economic thought,
and the civilising mission that became all-important to nineteenth-century
empire-building. In this period, piracy became more than an excuse for enforcing
navigational protection rackets. Proponents of the discourse claimed an intimate
knowledge of piracys causes and characteristics, and directly posited Europes
political and economic institutions (and its societal values more broadly) against it.
But they were also capable of targeting their critiques against elements of the
empire itself, specifically the East India Companys profit-driven rule in India, and its
repressive hold over British trade in Asia. Nevertheless, representations of piracy
ultimately communicated a moral right of suppression over a disparate set of sea-
faring communities, which embedded a universal legitimacy within the legal
regime of a global empire.80
This article has drawn together different regional components of what seems to
be a point of broad historiographical agreement. Piracy can no longer be
employed to describe a normative model or phenomenon, as historically it has
functioned as a criminalising category in service of particular structures of imperial
authority. I have considered here a period of expansive imperialism, to show that
within the interregional arena of the Indian Ocean world the role and movement
of ideology is inseparable from any identifiable process of economic transforma-
tion. In this period, imperialism was a force of integration in both of these respects.
Piracy was understood in ways that were relative to a new style of empire-building,
which actively sought to underwrite trading might and political influence with a
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 93

moral authority purporting to be universal in its applicability. There is thus a danger

in overemphasising the universality of piracy as a mode of resistance, for it is with-
in the discourse itself that such universality is also to be found. If piracy is a time-
less pursuit, it remains to be cautioned that the ways in which it has been under-
stood, and the actions that resulted from such understandings, were not. The term
was applied to disparate seafaring communities, each with different motivations
and capabilities, and claiming varying degrees of political legitimacy.
British attempts to monopolise violence at sea required an ethnically diverse set
of maritime traders and ruling elites to accept both the illegitimacy of maritime raid-
ing and Britains natural right of suppression. The alternative was to bear the
burden of a paradoxical appellation, the piratical state. Piracy was politicised at
the same time that its politics were denied, and branded with an ideology that stood
to challenge the twin projects of commerce and civilisation. Images of timelessness
and geographical determinism, racial degeneration and religious corruption, as well
as oriental despotism, acted in concert to construct an understanding of piracy that
was both natural and perverse. In the nascent years of economic liberalism, piracy
became anathema to modernity itself. Ultimately, as definitions were stretched, and
embedded within wider debates about political morality and the function of a
changing empire, the suppression of piracy also needed to be made accountable
to the British people themselves.
For historians, piracy is an apt lens through which we might view the nature of
imperial authority and its limits. It occupied the maritime spaces at the margins of
British influence in the Indian Ocean world, in which key ideological contestations
played out. The Age of Revolutions witnessed widespread political fragmentation
and the reassertion of European imperialism based on a global projection of sea
power. As Bayly writes, [t]he collapse of old supremacies and the sudden appear-
ance of aggressive foreigners ruptured indigenous histories around the world.81
Pirates who earned their wealth and exercised their power at sea, were caught
within these ruptures; their politics were deemed illegitimate, and their presence
within a global economy was impermissible. As a group of Sulu dryly noted, after
being sentenced in Singapore to hang, If we had not been pirates, our own chiefs
would have killed us; and, because we are pirates, you kill us: it is the same to us,
whatever we doeither way: we die.82
94 SIMON LAYTON

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96
Notes
* Simon Layton is a doctoral candidate at St
Catharine's College, University of Cambridge.
His thesis explores British imperial under-
standings of piracy in the Indian Ocean
world, as they developed from maritime
encounters in western India, the Persian/Arab
Gulf, and Southeast Asia during the late-eigh-
teenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
1 Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 43.
2 Naturally, the British naval school widely
accepts piracy as a normative description,
although it must be said that the subject has
generally not been well respected or repre-
sented in research, as compared to the grand
narrative of European navies at war with each
other. Several historians dealing with our
regions, who might also be accused of allow-
ing the piracy stigma to spread, have never-
theless contributed invaluable studies
towards its understanding. See, for example,
Tarling, Piracy and Politics; Kelly, Britain and
the Persian Gulf, 857. Kelly concluded that
the forcible submission of the Qasimi tribal
confederacy represented one of the most
honourable pages in the history of the British
Empire.
3 See Protin-Dumon, The Pirate and the
Emperor; Anderson, Piracy and World
History; Benton, Legal Spaces of Empire;
Subramanian, Of Pirates and Potentates.
4 Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 275.
5 Compare, for example, Davies, The Blood
Red Arab Flag (on the Qawasim), with Trocki,
Prince of Pirates (on the Temenggongs of
Johor).
6 Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 112-20.
On Schmitt, Agamben and exception, see
282-7.
7 See also Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War
against the Pirates.
8 Viscount Palmerston to Lord Howard de
Walden and Seaford, 7 October 1851,
Correspondencerelating to the slave trade,
108.
9 Justin Sheil to Palmerston, 1 March 1851 and
16 March 1851, Correspondencerelating
to the slave trade, 515, 518.
10 Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 112.
11 Das Gupta, Introduction II: The Story, 42-3.
12 Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise
in Pre-Colonial India, 5-6.
13 Laurie, Hints Regarding the East India
Monopoly, 5, 26.
14 Raffles, The History of Java, I: 232-3.
SIMON LAYTON
15 Jonathan Duncan to Lord Wellesley, 3 May
1805, IOR/F/4/189.4151.
16 Ibid.
17 Sen, Distant Sovereignty, 74.
18 Edward Presgrave to Kenneth Murchison,
Report on Piracy in the Strait Settlements,
5 December 1828, IOR/F/4/1724.69433, 60.
19 Evan Nepean to Court of Directors, 19 Octo-
ber 1813, IOR/F/4/447.10761.
20 Ibid.
21 Campo, Discourse without Discussion,
206.
22 Belgrave, The Pirate Coast, 1; quoted in
Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 44.
23 Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 123.
24 Alex Walker to Bombay, 2 February 1808,
MSA/S&P/225.4.
25 Keppel, Expedition to Borneo, 214.
26 Anniversary Meeting of the Royal Asiatic
Society, xxviii.
27 Jones, On the Borderers, Mountaineers, and
Islanders of Asia, III: 7.
28 Kapila, Race Matters, 488, 485.
29 Wagner, Thuggee.
30 Ibid., 157.
31 Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanis-
tan, 18-21; Elphinstone, An Account of the
Kingdom of Caubul.
32 Hatch, The Land Pirates of India, 27, 30. I
wish to thank Sunil Purushotham, for bring-
ing this work to my attention.
33 James Brooke to John C. Templer, 1 April
1844, and Brooke to Emma Francis
Johnson, 3 May 1844, in Templer, ed., The
Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, II: 14-
15, 19.
34 Brooke to Templer, 27 June 1845, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
II: 72.
35 Brooke, Proposed Exploring Expedition,
445.
36 An account of Wallaces time is Sarawak can
be found in Spenser St. John, The Life of Sir
James Brooke, 274.
37 Seton to Bombay, 28 December 1802,
MSA/S&P/134.4.
38 Raffles, The History of Java, I: 224.
39 Ibid, I: 232-3. For a revealing, and more
favourable, view of Arab instrumentality in
Southeast-Asian politics, see Othman,
Hadhramis in the Politics and Administration
of the Malay States, 82-93.
40 Quoted in Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf,
111.
41 Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, II: 213-14.
42 Brooke, journal entry, September 1840, in
Mundy, Narrative of Events in Borneo and
DISCOURSES OF PIRACY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
Celebes, I: 163-4.
43 Brooke to A. M. Brooke, 6 October 1842, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, I: 230.
44 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice, II: 370.
45 Brooke to Templer, 27 June 1845, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
II: 72.
46 Ibid., II: 549.
47 Ibid., II: 372.
48 John Ravenshaw to Bombay, 26 January
1803, MSA/S&P/137.4.
49 Colin Mackenzie, quoted in H. Mackenzie,
Storms and Sunshine of a Soldiers Life, 64-
5.
50 Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay
World, 100-1.
51 Ibid., 101-5.
52 Edward Owen to J. W. Croker, 6 August 1830,
ADM/125/144.
53 Petition from the Inhabitants of Singapore
to Robert Ibbetson, 5 May 1833, IOR/F/4/
1474.57847.
54 W. H. Dobbie, Summons to Sederam Rajah
of the Island of Bate, 7 December 1805,
IOR/F/4/189.4151.
55 Rubis, Oriental Despotism and European
Orientalism, 134.
56 Ibid., 110, 115. Rubis traces the earliest for-
mulations of Oriental despotism to
Aristotle, who held despotism to be peculiar
to the East, made possible only by the natu-
ral subservience of its inhabitants.
57 Buckingham, Appeal of a Governor
General, 6.
58 Buckingham, Summary of the Latest
Intelligence, 560 (emphasis added).
59 Brooke to Templer, 13 April 1843, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
I: 249.
60 Brooke to A. M. Brooke, 16 October 1842, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, I: 228.
61 Tarling, Britain, the Brookes and Brunei, 61-
2; Brooke to Templer, 31 December 1844, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, II: 42.
62 Brooke to Henry Wise, 14 July 1844, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, II: 217.
63 Brooke to Templer, 4 April 1845, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
II: 63.
64 Brooke to Templer, 29 November 1842, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, I: 231-5.
97
65 I consider this to be an apt name because of
Southeast Asias seismic volatility. One of the
five principal rivers of the underworld, Plato
describes the Phlegethon as the source of
volcanoes, a stream of fire, which coils
round the earth and flows into the depths of
Tartarus. Plato, Phaedo, 10.
66 Brooke to Templer, 24 August 1846, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, II: 149.
67 Brooke to Templer, 2 March 1849, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
II: 236.
68 Brooke to A. M. Brooke, 14 September 1841,
in Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir
James Brooke, I: 108.
69 Brooke to Templer, 4 April 1846, and 19 May
1846, in Templer, ed., The Private Letters of
Sir James Brooke, II: 133-4, 143.
70 Brooke to Templer, 19 May 1846, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
II: 143.
71 Irwin, Nineteenth-century Borneo, 140.
72 Richard Cobden, 23 May 1850, in Hansards
British Parliamentary Debates 108 (1850):
295.
73 Brooke to Templer, 15 May 1853, in Templer,
ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke,
III: 216.
74 Pybus, White Rajah, 7.
75 William Farquhar to Francis Collier, 25 Au-
gust 1849, quoted in Irwin, Nineteenth-cen-
tury Borneo, 140.
76 Hahn, James Brooke of Sarawak, 145.
77 Henry Drummond, 23 May 1850, in
Hansards British Parliamentary Debates,
108 (1850): 299. However, they were eventu-
ally paid a smaller amount of 20,700, which
was still a far greater sum than the average
payout at this time. Pybus, White Rajah, 7.
78 This was the so-called Piracy Act of 1850,
or An Act to repeal an Act of the Sixth Year of
King George the Fourth, for encouraging the
Capture or Destruction of Piratical Ships and
Vessels; and to make other Provisions in lieu
thereof, 13 & 14 Vict. c.26. Accessed online
at <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/
13-14/26/enacted>, 28 June 2011.
79 Brooke to Stuart, 2 November 1849, in
Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James
Brooke, II: 241.
80 On legal regimes, see Benton, Law and
Colonial Cultures.
81 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 86-8.
82 Brooke, journal entry, 1841, in Mundy,
Narrative of Events in Borneo, I: 241.