Subjecthood and Sovereignty among the ‘Real’ and ‘Imagined’ Pirates of a ‘Golden Age’, 1690–1705

This thesis, titled ‘Subjecthood and Sovereignty among the ‘Real’ and ‘Imagined’ Pirates of a ‘Golden Age’, 1690-1705’, offers a reconceptualisation of European piracy in the Indian Ocean through an exploration of piracy’s relationship with sovereignty and subjecthood. Traditionally interpreted through Euro-Atlantic frameworks, piracy’s steady shift during this period, both legally and in public meaning, towards hostis humani generis, the enemies of all mankind, has often been portrayed as both inevitable and orchestrated by European states and authorities. In contrast, this thesis reorientates the history of piracy to settlements at the peripheries, in which it foregrounds Euro-Asian entanglement and the role of local publics in defining the boundaries between pirate and nation. Central to the analysis is the contemporary usage of the phrase the ‘noise of pirates’, which facilitates an exploration of the interconnected nature of ‘real’ acts of piracy and their representations within emerging public spheres. In many respects, this thesis adopts a framework akin to Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘the social fact’ that treats piracy not solely as an activity of the individual, but as an imagined category imposed and manipulated by external agents. For most contemporaries, piracy was not something encountered firsthand, but something experienced through engagement with the partial and mediated descriptions and representations of specific incidents of plunder. By placing the emphasis upon piracy as an imagined phenomenon, this thesis challenges the binary often drawn between the ‘real pirates of history and the history of piracy in popular culture’. Throughout the thesis, the life of James Kelly, an English pirate, provides a narrative thread and chronological anchor for the study. In Chapter I, the socio-political subordinance of the English East India Company at the peripheries is established, as well as the dynamics of Anglo-Mughal relations in India in the 1690s. Chapter II then explores the popular protest and public reaction to the news of piracy in Asia, outlining how local discord influenced subsequent political developments and offering evidence for the existence of proto-public spheres in Mughal India. Following on from this, Chapter III introduces the ‘noise of piracy’ as a conceptual tool, in which it pays particular attention to the varying ways actors at the peripheries crossed cultural boundaries and attempted to navigate and shape the public response to piracy. Chapter IV reassesses the relevance of hostis humani genesis in political negotiations in India and highlights the influence of Euro-Asian interaction on the codification of piracy’s relationship with sovereignty. Chapter V then examines disputes over subjecthood, exploring the murkiness around identifying nation and how piracy destabilised notions of national identity and political allegiance. Finally, Chapter VI traces the reverberations of piracy’s ‘noise’ over time, linking cultural depictions to subsequent criminal acts and theorising the socio-cultural process it terms ‘criminal reification’. The process by which depictions, representations, and narratives of piracy shaped both historical memory and future piratical activity.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Hill, Jean-Marc

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gonzalez, John Henry

• 1690s
• Atlantic
• Aurangzeb
• Criminal Reification
• Early Modern
• Eighteenth Century
• Golden Age
• Henry Every
• History
• Imagined
• Indian Ocean
• James Kelly
• Maritime
• Mughal
• Oceanic
• Piracy
• Pirates
• Popular Culture
• Protest
• Public Sphere
• Publics
• Real
• Reification
• Safavid
• Seventeenth Century
• Social Fact
• Sovereignty
• Subjecthood
• Walter Kennedy
• William Kidd

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/e601c480-6589-4538-92f1-6dc3318881fd/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.123615

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/393177