The War of 1812’s end heralded a new era for the courts, and for the nation. Political leaders emboldened by having fought Great Britain to a standstill were eager to lay the groundwork for a new American empire. But adventurous Americans had their own priorities, and privateering on behalf of South American revolutionary governments offered new opportunities for wartime profit. Like the British in the 1790s, Spanish and Portuguese officials demanded that the federal government suppress such freelancing. To preserve relations, the Madison and Monroe administrations dusted off a tool for suppressing maritime violence that previous administrations had largely eschewed – criminal prosecutions for piracy. But a patchwork statutory regime and popular support for South American rebels made convictions difficult to secure. At a deeper level, privateering cases raised thorny questions about the sovereign status of former colonies seeking autonomy. As Congress and the executive branch struggled to adapt to the rapidly shifting political context in the Americas, federal judges expressed renewed doubts about extending their authority onto the high seas. The renaissance of privateering threatened to derail the American imperial project just as it was getting started.

In a familiar pattern, federal judges ultimately embraced their role as the architects of American sovereignty on the water. As the Monroe administration redoubled its prosecutions of South American privateers, Congress left it to judges to define the legitimate boundaries of maritime violence. The Supreme Court responded by casting doubt on the claims to sovereignty advanced by revolutionary polities, and declaring that privateers were merely pirates, and therefore subject to punishment by all – including the United States. This judicial assertion of legal authority to police the waters of the revolutionary Atlantic was transformative. It helped secure approval of a treaty with Spain that paved the way for decades of territorial expansion in North America, and it presaged increasingly expansive American claims to hemispherical preeminence. Even when federal judges denied their own power to discipline a different category of “pirates” – those who engaged in the slave trade – they did so to uphold sovereign rights that Americans had been asserting since independence. If a nineteenth century American empire was ultimately realized on land, some of its first stirrings were at sea.

Sea power, classically defined as a strategy to control communications, was an essential asset for the creation of European maritime empires, enabling them to secure seaborne trade, open new markets, and acquire territory. It has often been conflated with seapower, a concept developed by the ancient Athenians to distinguish states like their own, whose economy, culture, and identity were enmeshed in the maritime sphere, from continental military powers like Sparta and Persia. In this period Britain, the only seapower Great Power, created an extensive maritime empire outside Europe, one combining colonies of settlement, like Australia, with those of occupation, and informal imperialism based on economic power. While many Continental European powers created maritime empires after 1815, they did so in the knowledge that their possessions would be exposed to British naval power in the event of war, and tended to focus on land and security rather than commerce.

After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

This chapter tracks the modernisation of the extradition law of Hong Kong against the backdrop of empire-wide legal reform. In 1865–73, two explosive scandals caused imperial officials and judges to impose belated restrictions on the colonial removal of fugitives to China. The first, the case of How Yu-teen (1865), involved embarrassing allegations of British complicity in China’s violent execution of a political refugee; the second, Attorney General of Hong Kong v. Kwok-a-Sing (1873), was a habeas corpus dispute born of colonial infighting and the only extradition dispute to reach the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the nineteenth century. These scandals propelled Hong Kong away from the flexible and jurisdictional practice of rendition, as imperial officials ignored colonial fears of establishing a Chinese ‘Alsatia’ – a disreputable refuge for Chinese criminals. The new reality – the imperially homogenous, late-Victorian law of extradition – carried drastically heightened and irreversible expectations of individual rights and executive comportment.

This chapter examines the Hong Kong government’s practice of giving people up to foreign authorities during 1850–65 on charges of crimes committed at sea. Framed as ‘rendition’, an early version of extradition, this mechanism was used to remove several hundred accused pirates, mutineers, and other criminals of Chinese origin – criminals that officials believed China was better suited to punish. Other seafarers were also given up to France and the United States as the colony sought to take pressure off its overstretched and barely functional courts and prison system. Ideas of British sovereignty and the international law of piracy fuelled this pragmatic policy. Notably, officials believed that maritime crimes should only be tried in Hong Kong if they implicated ‘British interests’, specifically British victims, offenders, or territory. This rationale for jurisdictional restraint reached a controversial zenith in 1861. In the case of the French coolie ship, Ville D’Agen, a Peruvian sailor, Juan Pastor was nearly given up to China despite the absence of any treaty or statutory basis for his rendition.

Between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, norms on maritime warfare by both private and public actors developed through the intensification of maritime trade networks, European colonial and commercial expansion in other continents, the growing ascendancy of the sovereign state, and the emergence of a distinctive legal scholarship on topics of the law of nations. Although even among European political actors, there was still no general consensus on precise and binding norms governing maritime warfare, the building stones of a normative framework were gradually established which would be integrated from the later seventeenth century onwards into a more consistent body of international law. Prize courts played a crucial role in promoting the principles of such a legal framework, as did state practice on key issues such as blockade, contraband and neutrality.

This chapter offers a discussion on the laws of war, or jus in bello, as the previous one. However, it provides an exclusive focus on maritime warfare. Old Regime Europe was marked by the expansion of permanent state battlefleets and the strengthening of naval administrations. At the same time, a complementarity between public and private forms of maritime warfare, notably privateering, persisted as one of the defining aspects of naval warfare. The chapter deals with the specificity of waging war at sea and related legal issues. It draws both from state-military practice and from the specialised legal literature that started to appear at the time. Subjects which are covered include the main rules of naval warfare, privateering, the treatment of prisoners of war, the bombardment of coastal cities, prize law and the role of admiralty courts. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of maritime neutrality. Indeed, the recurrent tension between the respective rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents assumed great relevance in this period, being often dealt with in international treaties and legal scholars’ treatises.

This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.

This chapter reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of Elizabethan botanical privateering, the trade in printed herbals, and Elizabeth I’s personal association with the pansy. It argues that privateering was an advetnure for people of all social groups through which national and civic identity was worked out in botanical terms. It looks especially at the botanically-adorned baby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of early modern naval trade, national competition and the illicit movement of children.

Security measures aimed at the repression of corsairing continued apace in the wake of 1816. ‘Barbary piracy’ remained a subject of negotiation and cooperation during the late 1810s and early 1820s. It was dealt with at ambassadorial conferences in London, during meetings of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), in combined talks with the Ottoman Porte, and through an Anglo-French expedition to the coasts of North Africa. Increasingly ambitious efforts to enact maritime security and an increasingly vocal opposition to such efforts marked the eight years following the Anglo–Dutch bombardment of 1816. The authorities of the regencies managed to thwart several European security practices, ranging from concerted communications to defensive alliances. To understand the starts, stops and reversals of the fight against Mediterranean piracy, local activity needs to be analysed. This chapter foregrounds the role of actors who were deemed piratical threats. The contestations of these threatening actors influenced the shape and success of European security practices.

The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.

The Anglo-Dutch bombardment of Algiers on 27 August 1816 indicated how, after the Congress of Vienna, a new order based on collective security was taking shape, not just on the continent, but also in the Mediterranean Sea. This chapter suggests that 1816 was a moment of departure from past traditions and signified the creation of a new Mediterranean order. Defining features of that order – such as modes of cooperation, the linkage to the Congress System, the use of security as a legitimizing discourse and the important roles of smaller and non-European powers – all came into play during the Anglo–Dutch bombardment. Additionally, this Anglo–Dutch cooperation shows how various states took the lead in the fight against piracy, dependent upon the situation. There was not a single naval hegemon who executed the repressive effort. At this early stage, smaller powers initially drove the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, later to be followed by Great Britain, Russia and France. The effort became a truly pan-European reorganisation of security in the Mediterranean.

In order to appreciate the imperial impact of the new security culture, the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 ought to be seen within the framework of the post-1815 Congress System and the Concert of Europe. Though the invasion of Algiers was essentially a unilateral action undertaken under the national flag, it nevertheless took shape through extended multinational deliberation and involved a fair share of diplomatic concertation among the different European Great Powers. French imperial aspirations became intertwined with the repression of Mediterranean piracy, which was understood as a shared, European project. In attacking Algiers, members of the French government sought to reassert the country’s position as a nation on par with the other Great Powers of the European continent. The conflict with Algiers allowed French officials to assert status through the much more ‘disinterested’, ‘European’ goal of ending piracy and bringing security to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

This chapter takes stock of the many consequences and conflicting legacies of the French invasion of Algiers. It analyses the effects of this climactic event in the fight against Mediterranean piracy. The invasion’s immediate consequences allow us to reflect upon the security goals French actors and their allies had attached to the expedition – and uncovers the long-term impact of those goals. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the two decades following 1830. These were the years in which French expansion commenced and soon posed international problems in Algeria’s environs. Lastly, I discuss how earlier European security efforts against piracy featured at the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War (1853–1856), particularly in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, which abolished privateering as a legitimate wartime practice. That text finalised the steady delegitimation of North African corsairing and the violent engagement with the Barbary Regencies. It served as a memorial, a recorded legacy of all the preceding negotiation, repression and destruction. It both marks a new era of international law and denotes, in the light of piracy repression, an ending to the old traditions of Mediterranean corsairing.

This book focuses on the way in which ideas and discourses of security have shaped the conduct of international relations in the past. Its main concerns include how historical actors conceived of security as an idea, used it in their writings and discussions, pondered its implementation and turned conceptions into practice. Security efforts shaped international relations at a crucial moment in history, during the first half of the nineteenth century, when international systems and global divisions of power dramatically changed. International involvement with Mediterranean piracy reflected all of these changes. Yet, in order to better grasp the impact of security considerations, one must look at the means by which contemporaries made sense of, were swayed by and, also, turned against the concept. Security must be historicised.