For centuries the western coasts of India had been the focus of Europe’s seaborne empires in the Indian Ocean, where port-cities such as Calicut and Surat dominated regional trade, attracting merchants, explorers, and statesmen from all corners of Eurasia’s trading world. From the late eighteenth century, the East India Company’s growing port at Bombay emerged ascendant over its rivals in western India, aspiring to become a mercantile and naval hub to complement and compete with the agrarian empire being built from Bengal. This chapter considers the Bombay Presidency’s efforts to erode and ultimately subordinate local practices of sovereignty and dominion along the politically fragmented littoral spaces of western India. In a war fought as much on paper between statesmen as on the seas between seafarers, debts for alleged acts of piracy were compounded on behalf of a growing body of mercantile subjects, and ultimately settled through the exchange of forts, ports, and territory.