This article places maritime violence at the center of the history of international ordering. It views the transformation of the nineteenth-century Atlantic from the deck of one ship, a Baltimore-built privateer called the Irresistible. The ship’s captain seized Spanish and Portuguese shipping under a privateering commission from the Oriental Republic. Sponsorship of privateers by the Oriental Republic and other new Latin American governments reflected an open-ended Atlantic constitutionalism that recognized sovereignty at multiple scales. That constitutional context formed the background to three cases involving the Irresistible and its crew that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The cases show how privateering politics opened to wide-ranging debates about the definition of states, war, and piracy, while preserving the indeterminacies of sovereignty in the new Atlantic system. That system, closing as it formed, was composed of new states pressured to align with powerful empires. Privateering disputes featured sharpening rhetoric about piracy as a crime under the law of nations while at the same time preserving a regime that protected low-level maritime violence. Situating the politics of piracy at the nexus of domestic and international orders, the article highlights the political uses and legal limits of the discourse of pirates as enemies of all and connects this history to an understanding of terrorism and states in the international order.

This paper is a response to Lauren Benton’s 2025 Thrupp Lecture.

Lauren Benton’s paper invites a comparison between deserts and oceans, camels and ships. This is a comparison that I have always resisted, partly because it is somewhat trite; partly because it directs attention away from the desert—the Sahara, in this case—not merely as a space to be crossed, but as a space of life in its own right. Much of the recent renewal in Saharan studies stems from the rejection of this analogy (McDougall 2007): people live in the Sahara in a way that they do not live in the in-between spaces of the ocean, which is something I will return to later. But if, just for once, we set these misgivings aside, a few interesting parallels do emerge.

Lauren Benton reminds us that to write about piracy as historians (and anthropologists) is to engage in projects of “myth-making and myth-busting.” As she notes, pirates are either imagined as “colorful rogues…inherently anti-authoritarian actors who possessed a penchant for experimenting with alternative forms of political solidarity,” or they are depicted in a less renegade fashion, one that shows “their integration in established, if fluid, networks of patronage and power.” Instead of colorful outlaws, Benton (2014) argues that pirates are more akin to lawyers engaged in “legal posturing,” converting “booty into property.” As political actors, their politics are often far from revolutionary. Benton’s scholarship has been at the forefront of this latter school of myth-busting, and her work has been inspirational in rethinking the relationship between piracy, politics, and maritime space in order to tell a different kind of sea yarn. As she wrote in her 2005 CSSH essay, “[i]n my sea yarn, the oceans have a quality of lumpiness about them, pirates strain not to break the law, and international norms take shape not at Westphalia but at the edges of the Indian Ocean” (Benton 2005: 701–2).

Drawing on the articles in this forum, the essay considers continuities in the relation of raiding to regional reordering and reflects on capture as a sociolegal phenomenon. It comments on three dimensions of capture: the moment of capture, the transformation of booty into property, and the wider legal and institutional context of capture, from protection arrangements to jurisdictional politics.