Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Piracy in World History
- 2 “Publique Enemies to Mankind”: International Pirates as a Product of International Politics
- 3 All at Sea: Locke’s Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought
- 4 The Colonial Origins of Theorizing Piracy’s Relation to Failed States
- 5 The Bugis-Makassar Seafarers: Pirates or Entrepreneurs?
- 6 Piracy in India’s Western Littoral: Reality and Representation
- 7 Holy Warriors, Rebels, and Thieves: Defining Maritime Violence in the Ottoman Mediterranean
- 8 Piracy, Empire, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial China
- 9 Persistent Piracy in Philippine Waters: Metropolitan Discourses about Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, and Moro Coastal Threats, 1570–1800
- 10 Sweden, Barbary Corsairs, and the Hostis Humani Generis: Justifying Piracy in European Political Thought
- 11 “Pirates of the Sea and the Land”: Concurrent Vietnamese and French Concepts of Piracy during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 12 Pirate Passages in Global History: Afterword
- Index
3 - All at Sea: Locke’s Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Piracy in World History
- 2 “Publique Enemies to Mankind”: International Pirates as a Product of International Politics
- 3 All at Sea: Locke’s Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought
- 4 The Colonial Origins of Theorizing Piracy’s Relation to Failed States
- 5 The Bugis-Makassar Seafarers: Pirates or Entrepreneurs?
- 6 Piracy in India’s Western Littoral: Reality and Representation
- 7 Holy Warriors, Rebels, and Thieves: Defining Maritime Violence in the Ottoman Mediterranean
- 8 Piracy, Empire, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial China
- 9 Persistent Piracy in Philippine Waters: Metropolitan Discourses about Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, and Moro Coastal Threats, 1570–1800
- 10 Sweden, Barbary Corsairs, and the Hostis Humani Generis: Justifying Piracy in European Political Thought
- 11 “Pirates of the Sea and the Land”: Concurrent Vietnamese and French Concepts of Piracy during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 12 Pirate Passages in Global History: Afterword
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Although the concept of pirates as hostes humani generis appears to be axiomatic, it is argued in this chapter that piracy elicited more ambiguous responses from philosophers and lawyers in late seventeenth-century Britain. Pirates were merely one among a pantheon of archetypal enemies of good order. By examining references to piracy in the work of the English political philosopher John Locke in particular, it is argued here that pirates vied with tyrants for the title of “common enemy of all humankind.” Locke's prevarications were mirrored by continuing doubts and legal debates about who the hostis humani generis really was.
Keywords: hostis humani generis, law, political philosophy, John Locke, tyrants, sovereignty
Introduction
Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724) has long intrigued scholars, not least for its ambivalent tone towards its eponymous subjects – the “pyrates.” With both shocked outrage and breathless fascination, the book presented brief biographies of maritime violence and plunder, embellished and invented from the life stories some of the most notorious of Europe's pirate captains. The General History confirmed the figure of the “pyrate” very much as Cicero had defined it in the first century BCE, as the common enemy of all humankind. Yet, the implication of Johnson's text was that the “pyrate” could not literally be a hostis humani generis because an “enemy” was one who lived within a domain constituted by sovereign law. Hence, the “pyrate” could not be an “enemy” because they placed themselves outside of any sphere of sovereignty whatsoever. In the words of the “Abstract of the Civil Law and Statute Law now in Force, in Relation to Pyracy,” included towards the end of the book:
Though Pyrates are called common Enemies, yet they are properly not to be term’d so. He is only to honour’d with that Name, says Cicero, who hath a Commonwealth, a Court, a Treasury, Consent and Concord of Citizens, and some Way, if Occasion be, of Peace and League: But when they have reduced themselves into a Government or State, as those of Algier, Sally, Tripoly, Tunis, and the like, they then are allowed the Solemnities of War, and the rights of Legation.
The hostis humani generis subsisting fitfully on the cruel seas beyond the reach of law was a fiction of territorial sovereignty.
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- Piracy in World History , pp. 61 - 84Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021