New from the University of Massachusetts Press:
The Ocean Is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (May 2014), by
Guy Chet (University of North Texas). The Press explains:
Historians have long maintained that the rise of the British empire
brought an end to the great age of piracy, turning the once violent
Atlantic frontier into a locus of orderly commerce by 1730. In this
book, Guy Chet reassesses that view by documenting the persistence of
piracy, smuggling, and other forms of illegal trade throughout the
eighteenth century despite ongoing governmental campaigns to stamp it
out. The failure of the Royal Navy to police oceanic trade reflected the
state’s limited authority and legitimacy at port, in the courts, and in
the hearts and minds of Anglo-American constituents.
Chet shows
how the traditional focus on the growth of the modern state overlooked
the extent to which old attitudes and cultural practices continued to
hold sway. Even as the British government extended its naval, legal, and
bureaucratic reach, in many parts of the Atlantic world illegal trade
was not only tolerated but encouraged. In part this was because
Britain’s constabulary command of the region remained more tenuous than
some have suggested, and in part because maritime insurance and wartime
tax policies ensured that piracy and smuggling remained profitable. When
Atlantic piracy eventually waned in the early nineteenth century, it
had more to do with a reduction in its profitability at port than with
forceful confrontation at sea.
Challenging traditional accounts
that chronicle forces of civilization taming a wild Atlantic frontier,
this book is a valuable addition to a body of borderlands scholarship
reevaluating the relationship between the emerging modern state and its
imperial frontiers.
A few blurbs:
"An interesting, well written, and well-conceived book. The primary
sources and the secondary works consulted are extensive and sensible,
and the book makes an effective contribution to a number of
fields—Atlantic history, maritime history, government and the nature of
the early modern state, and international history."—Trevor Burnard
"This
thoughtful and persuasive volume is one of the most important
contributions to the emerging understanding of the limited reach of
state authority and empire during the early modern era. Focusing upon
the British government’s inability to stop piracy, wrecking, and
smuggling both on the sea and along the coastline of the Atlantic world
throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, this
study underlines the vast gap between policy and enforcement within the
British Empire, the widespread dispersal of authority endemic to state
and empire and indeed essential to their success, and the weakness of
metropolitan coercive resources. In the process, Guy Chet makes an
overwhelmingly convincing case against those who have uncritically
assumed state policy pronouncements can be taken as an accurate
indication of how empires worked."—Jack P. Greene
More information is available
here.
