In this sweeping study of piracy in the British Atlantic World, Mark Hanna has more to offer than just a compendium of early modern pirates and their daring deeds. He has instead given us an enthralling account of imperial efforts to employ, exclude, and eventually eliminate pirates from the port cities of the British Empire. Although Hanna does build his narrative around famous pirates like Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and Edward Teach, his real interest lies ashore in the port towns of the Atlantic World that gave them safe harbour. These eponymous pirate nests include maritime communities like Plymouth in England, Port Royal in Jamaica, and Providence in Rhode Island, who offered sanctuary to pirates for a variety of legal, political, and religious reasons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a refreshing break with most scholarship on pirates, Hanna does not attempt to re-litigate the difference between piracy and privateering, because his argument that a royal commission to plunder enemy ships was far less critical to a pirate’s legitimacy than the patronage and protection they could count on when they eventually came ashore. The pirates in this narrative are avatars for a greater struggle between the nests that sheltered them, and the British imperial government in London, over the proper application of “political power, the rule of law, and oppressive market regulations” throughout the Empire (4).
Each of Hanna’s ten chapters (bookended by an introduction and conclusion) focus on a significant period in the history of piracy, with each period narrowing in duration as the book moves towards the critical decade of the 1690s. In his chapters on the English West Country, colonization in the Caribbean, and especially on Jamaica (Chapters 1–3), Hanna argues that pirates fulfilled a vital economic, political, and even religious role in parts of the English Atlantic that were independent of the Crown’s direct control. Whether plundering Cartagena or harassing the Spanish silver fleet, these sea dogs helped define England’s early adversarial relationship with the Americas. As royal officials claimed greater control over trade ever, port towns in North America turned to pirates to provide the luxury items—including bullion, slaves, and after 1600, East India products—that otherwise got purchased from monopolistic corporations like the Royal African Company. Hanna is careful to distinguish between royal colonies like Virginia, where the Crown appointed governors and enforced English laws regarding illicit trade; and private (or charter, or proprietary) colonies where governors depended on local support to maintain their authority and generally allowed colonists to flout imperial regulations. As royal officials like Edward Randolph intensified their efforts to bring private colonies like the Bahamas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania into line with English law, many colonists developed “moral justifications for overlooking the details of illicit maritime plunder” to resist encroaching centralization (13).
Hanna’s argument in Pirate Nests hinges on the renewed Navigation Act passed by the English Parliament in 1696, the origins of which earn the sixth chapter to themselves. According to Hanna, this law changed the nature of both pirate patronage and pirate hunting in the eighteenth century and changed popular perceptions of pirates from free Englishmen exercising their liberties to disloyal villains threatening the legitimate commerce of the British Empire instead. Hanna joins a rising chorus of Early American historians who have recently drawn our attention to the 1690s as a pivotal era in the British Atlantic World, but he is the first to pinpoint the 1696 reform as the critical law that empowered London officials to overrule their colonies on legal and political issues. The new act addressed complaints from royal governors that they lacked the political power to enforce earlier Navigation Acts by creating vice-admiralty courts in the colonies, which turned piracy into a crime tried before military tribunals rather than local colonial juries. As Hanna shows us, this seemingly minor reform represented a sea change in how the rule of law was applied throughout the British Empire and led to a more uniform approach to maritime crime across the Atlantic World.
But although his seventh through tenth chapters demonstrate how the restrictions imposed by this new law undermined piracy in the early eighteenth century, Hanna’s focus on the 1696 reform poses a critical question that he answers only implicitly: what was the difference between a smuggler and a pirate in the early modern Atlantic World? This question is more than merely a finicky terminological issue because, for Hanna, the adage that every pirate is a smuggler but not every smuggler is a pirate does not seem to apply. He argues that pirates were economically vital to the colonies that harboured them because they provided gold, slaves, and rare East India goods. Aside from bullion, we know that these goods were also brought into North American port cities by lower-profile smugglers. Illicit traders from Scotland and the Dutch Republic were targeted by Randolph and other defenders of the Navigation Acts with as much vitriol as they directed at pirates. Indeed, it is striking that nearly every pirate that Hanna writes about was an Englishman, and therefore a protected trader under the Navigation Acts. This fact suggests that piracy was in many ways a high-risk, get-rich-quick scheme for pirates and colonists alike, but not as crucial or as representative a contribution to colonial economies as Hanna suggests.
Regardless, Pirate Nests will surely become the definitive work on early modern piracy for maritime and imperial historians alike. By drawing long overdue attention to the links between piracy, ports, and politics in the British Empire, Mark Hanna’s book requires anyone lecturing on pirates to rethink the stories we tell our students about these maritime freebooters.
