As the British Empire expanded in Asia, the concept of piracy was reconstructed: the pirate became part-criminal and part-sovereign—a desperate savage born of anarchic geography, yet a powerful despot wielding political violence against the enshrined freedoms of humanity. The paradox of piratical statehood saw potentates punished as if they were pirates, and seafarers warred upon as if they were states. The British construed their own sea power as a force for modernity while consigning those who challenged them to a bygone era. Such ‘pirates’ were not to be found upon the high seas, but along coastlines and in converging straits and waterways, where dynamic, local sovereignties had hitherto held sway. As a criminalising category, charges of piracy were not levelled by the hegemonic authorities of a monolithic empire, but arose in the conversations between administrators, the petitions of merchants, in newspaper columns, and through the diplomacy of ‘men on the spot’. The condemned seldom conformed to any pirate archetype; they could at best be described as ‘piratical’—a semantic slippage that transformed the specific actions of individuals into a pervasive and immutable condition.