Matthew McCarthy's well-written and interesting book is a welcome addition to the growing sub-field of research that situates the history of the Atlantic world on the Atlantic Ocean itself. He argues that ‘maritime violence … was integral to the Spanish American revolutions that followed the French invasion of Spain in 1808’, and that as a result, ‘the political turbulence of the period 1810–1830 provided the conditions for private maritime predation to flourish’ (p. 2). McCarthy aims to link the body of existing research on fields that have been treated separately in the past and convincingly argues that they are, in fact, quite closely related. His introduction offers a succinct and helpful historiographical survey of four themes: prize-taking, privateering, the emergence of international maritime law, and nineteenth-century British imperialism. McCarthy argues that piracy was ‘the first widely-recognized crime against humanity’ and explains its nature and purpose according to the perspectives of state governments, Spanish American patriots, merchants, navies and the pirates themselves.

The first chapter offers an overview of Britain's political and commercial interest in Spanish America in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The subject has been quite exhaustively covered by diplomatic, political and economic historians for decades, but McCarthy is able to survey the existing research and draw out a clear narrative for his readers. He underscores the rapid growth in legitimate trade from Britain to Spanish America during this period and characterises much of it as ‘legally ambiguous’ (p. 15). Although the emphasis on the British role sidelines the parallel expansion of US-based trade, this is an effective survey that provides background for the subsequent discussion of the author's research. The second chapter focuses on a careful definition of maritime predation in which McCarthy distinguishes between activities authorised by (as yet unrecognised) Spanish American patriot governments, by the Spanish government, and by individuals based in Cuba who sailed without licence from any governing entity. Much of the chapter is devoted to the very interesting subject of prize-taking and the prize courts; there were an astonishing 184 cases adjudicated in 1818 alone. McCarthy nicely captures the intense feelings that these privateers engendered when he quotes Niles’ Weekly Register's characterisation of them as ‘the greatest villains that ever blackened the human character’ (p. 32).

Chapter 3 develops some of the empirical results of the extensive research that McCarthy has done on the prize action cases that were lodged in various Admiralty courts during the period between 1810 and 1830. He notes that a large proportion of these cases experienced trouble identifying the jurisdiction to which the seized ship actually belonged, and then goes on to link these legal unpleasantries with the related costs and burdens placed on the maritime insurance industry. Chapter 4 goes on to discuss the psychological, financial and human cost of privateering and explain why it became an overriding policy objective for the British government to stamp it out in the 1820s. McCarthy explicitly questions the ‘informal empire’ paradigm in this chapter, pointing out that his research shows that private merchant interests emphatically ‘were not enough to compel the British government to act’ on their behalf (p. 90). He then discusses the very different response that was required for privateers whom the Spanish government sponsored, since Britain was its ostensible ally against Napoleon. Chapter 6 outlines the efforts of the joint Anglo-Spanish Claims Commission to settle outstanding issues between the two powers. The final chapter discusses the activities of the only group that may properly be identified as pirates, namely the individuals based in Cuba who plagued the region between 1821 and 1824. This chapter leads directly into McCarthy's conclusion that efforts to define and suppress maritime predation were a crucial part of the ‘ongoing legal debate in its complex political context about the rights and duties of neutrals’ (p. 157).

The book is well researched and based mainly on primary sources from the Admiralty and Foreign Office records in the United Kingdom National Archives, and on parliamentary debates. McCarthy has also integrated valuable material from Lloyd's List, contemporary newspapers and printed primary sources that range from consular reports to sensational accounts of capture by pirates. He artfully begins and ends the study with a reference to the intense literary interest in pirates in the early nineteenth century, most famously exhibited in Byron's 1814 verse tale, The Corsair. The author has provided a clear and helpful historiographical discussion as part of the book's introductory chapter and then restrains himself mainly to citing primary sources in his footnotes, with only a few nods to the secondary literature along the way. This format is likely to become more common as publishers seek to trim word counts and keep the focus on the text itself.

One of the unusual and valuable elements of McCarthy's study that is likely to be of interest to readers and students alike is the online database that he has constructed and made available for others. It contains 1,688 records of prize actions and encounters between commercial shipping and maritime predators, at least 336 of which involved British ships. McCarthy has created seven graphical representations of this information, depicting the shifts in numbers and victims over time, all of which are printed in the book and available online, together with the raw data, at www.hull.ac.uk/mhsc/piracy-mccarthy/. The University of Hull does have a prominent research presence in this field – it publishes the International Journal of Maritime History and has historians involved in the transatlantic slavery database project – and McCarthy himself is the research officer at its Maritime Historical Research Centre and affiliated archive. His next project will be to study the transatlantic shipment of arms to the Spanish American revolutionaries, and judging from the high quality of the work done here, it promises to be a valuable and engaging treatment of an understudied element of the wars of independence.