Culture and Coercion: Piracy and State Power in the Early Modern English Empire

Between 1670 and the late 1720s, English state agents sought to curtail piracy --- a critical struggle in the consolidation of imperial power. Based on a comparison of the efforts of English state agents to combat piracy in the periods 1670-1700 and 1704-1726, the dissertation argues that piracy posed English state agents with a complex classification problem. The earlier period was characterized by pervasive ambiguity about what counted as piracy, and who was authorized to legally classify and punish piracy, while in the latter period a ruthless legal clarity prevailed, and state agents executed pirates throughout the empire. The dissertation argues that coercive power depends on a cultural infrastructure, a system of signs that makes coordinated, meaningful action possible, and that there was a disjuncture between the coercive desires of English state agents, and the cultural infrastructure available to them. This disjuncture was the central mechanism in their coercive failure. The process of producing coercive power against piracy depended on a transformation of the semiotic structure of imperial piracy law, and its integration with primordial principles of legal legitimacy such as the rule of law and jurisdiction. Structural changes also needed to be staged in social performances. These social performances signified the new state powers of violence in ways that were conducive to interpretation by pirates and potential pirates as a real coercive threat. The aesthetics of trials and executions, as well as other facets of the social performance of the new meanings of piracy, were thus not peripheral to the exercise of coercive power, but central to it. Coercion is often taken to be primarily connected with problems of force and violence. This dissertation argues for a re-evaluation of this assessment. Coercive power is also dependent on relatively autonomous cultural forces. The destruction of the niche of legal ambiguity that pirates had long enjoyed in the English empire was achieved partly through such relatively autonomous cultural processes. These processes played a central role in ultimately enabling the fusion of state institutions, material resources, coordinated capacities for legitimate violence, and powers of interpretation that produced coercive power against the pirates.