This deeply researched, innovative study demystifies the way we think about the pirates of world history. Simon Layton encourages readers to look beyond eighteenth-century Atlantic paradigms of rogue individuals or revolutionary collectives, placing piracy as a concept at the heart of the British imperial project in Asia in the nineteenth century. Piratical States reveals an empire bent on wresting sovereignty over maritime space with its own forms of institutional and outsourced violence. A discourse developed in the official mind of colonial 'men-on-the-spot' castigated an array of indigenous seafaring communities and interrupted state-building across the corridors and chokepoints of global trade. In reports, diaries, correspondence, and memoranda, Britain's self-declared pirate-hunters retold history through a mythology of their own making, transforming piracy into an inherently political and racial category, legitimising the wholesale erasure of their enemies.

‘Simon Layton's concise study has offered a novel way to study British imperialism through piracy. Placing Britain's imperialism in the Indian Ocean in a wider framework, Layton enables local reactions to appear, thus challenging world historians to add their voices to the meaning of imperialism in their interconnected oceans.'

Leonard Y. Andaya - University of Hawai'i at Manoa

‘Exposing the paradox of branding not persons but entire polities and peoples as ‘piratical,' Layton offers an important reinterpretation of the history of piracy and a decisive case for locating the foundations of British imperial power in the Indian Ocean world at the confluence of land and sea.'

Philip J. Stern - Duke University