guychet

Preconditions for piracy & against suppression: Lucrative cargoes Vast seas Economic and cultural factors for piracy & against suppression: Wartime economies Lucrative black market Supportive hosts in local communities Limited capabilities and high cost of naval enforcement: Unmotivated captains in national navies Inability of navies to seal coastlines and control maritime trade routes Cost (to governments) of patrolling the seas Cost (to merchants & ship owners) of convoying Limited capabilities and high cost of regulatory enforcement at port: Strained national finances – governments with limited funds and manpower Communal resistance to state regulation at sea and port Supremacy of custom over statutory law Piratical stimulants: Insurance Competition between insurers Sailors who were marginal in their home communities Ransom

The Limits of Naval Power and the Persistence of Open Piracy in the Atlantic, 1688-1830 The rise and decline of Atlantic piracy has been used to gauge the level of commercial, naval and diplomatic control that Britain exercised in the Atlantic. Indeed, naval historians have suggested that by 1730, British policing of maritime trade routes had eradicated piracy in the region. Yet statistical data and anecdotal evidence indicate that transporting cargoes in the Atlantic remained risky well into the nineteenth century. These data suggest that Britain’s constabulary command of the region was not nearly as thorough as some have suggested. Piracy was eventually ushered out of the Atlantic indirectly and inadvertently, not through forceful confrontation at sea, but in response to the reduced profitability of contraband. Britain’s ineffective anti-piracy campaign reveals the limits of British power at sea, but also on land, vis-à-vis its constituents. Violence and property losses at sea were useful to authorities in their efforts to articulate differences between the illegitimate violence of pirates and smugglers, and legitimate force wielded by the government. And yet, the government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction beyond coastal waters, monopolize violence, and sanction some forms of maritime commerce while delegitimizing others, were consistently resisted, ignored and thwarted by large swaths of English society on both sides of the ocean.

Is God of the Hebrew Bible a singular or plural being?

Modern accounts of Atlantic piracy depict the Royal Navy as an effective police force that, in the course of a generation (1697-1730), transformed the Atlantic from a violent frontier into a locus of orderly commerce. Scholars who see a sharp decline in piracy in the early-eighteenth century argue that a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion produced a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy. A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the nineteenth century, with Britons persisting in seeing “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate despite imperial attempts to effect change. As early-modern European states were centralizing their bureaucracies, establishing ideologies of state and law, modernizing their finances, and enacting bureaucratic and commercial monopolies as tools of state building, seas and oceans experienced a different course of development. As national mercantilist economies emerged in Europe, oceans formed trans-imperial trade zones, which operated as free-trade zones, given that legal trade restrictions were easily and routinely violated. The vastness of the ocean allowed British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to retain an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and to resist legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building. The distance between imperial law and commercial practice corresponded to the distance between the seats of government and the myriad loci of Atlantic commercial activities. Governments’ efforts to bridge this ethical gap inevitably involved attempts to bridge the geographical gap as well, enhancing the presence and role of state agents in local jurisdictions and at sea. In this sense, statutory law was a form of propaganda regarding the reach of state authority – a proclamation of national governments’ policy aspirations, as well as their presumptions to jurisdiction and administrative sway in peripheral communities. Such propaganda remained unconvincing under governments that demonstrated to constituents that they did not have the capacity to enforce the law.

The dominant scholarly understanding of the Bible (for the past 150 years or so) is that the books of the Old Testaments were not written by single authors; rather, each book – indeed, each story! – is composed of literary fragments cobbled together into a single text. This understanding of the Bible calls on us, therefore, to read each book not as a literary whole, but to identify the different sources that make up a Biblical story to understand who wrote each fragment, when, where, for what audience, and for what purpose. Because it requires readers to read the Bible historically – to identify the history of the text itself – this method of Biblical analysis (source analysis) precludes a traditional literary reading of the Bible. In doing so, it robs readers of a unique literary experience, and perhaps also robs an ancient author of literary credit he had rightly earned.