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practice in this upending was that of privateering. Privateering played a crucial part both in the survival of Protestantism in Europe and in the spread of the European-dominated state system, accounting largely for how polities beyond the Iberian ones went overseas and how they came to settle around the world. By continuously pushing boundaries, privateering proved to be a perfectly suited practice for challenging
seventeenth centuries. During this period, pirates and privateers launched repeated raids along the French coastlines, while soldiers, militia bands, and bandits engaged in significant raiding 90 Part I: Coherence and fragmentation activities in the countryside and woodlands of the interior. These raiding parties inflicted violence and destruction that left traces in manuscript sources conserved in archives in Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and other cities. These sources include: provincial and municipal government records; reports of French consuls
sea changed. But it must be said that the inverse is also true. And the production of political space alerts us to the relational (Jackson and Nexon, 1999 ) processes delineating ‘land’ from ‘sea’. The sea is also important to understanding processes that traverse the dry and the wet such as piracy and privateering. If IR scholars are to understand international politics, then we need to focus on how
The sea and International Relations is a path-breaking collection which opens up the conversation about the sea in International Relations (IR), and probes the value of analysing the sea in IR terms. While the world’s oceans cover more than 70 percent of its surface, the sea has largely vanished as an object of enquiry in IR, being treated either as a corollary of land or as time. Yet, the sea is the quintessential international space, and its importance to global politics has become all the more obvious in recent years. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from IR, historical sociology, blue humanities and critical ocean studies, The sea and International Relations breaks with this trend of oceanic amnesia, and kickstarts a theoretical, conceptual and empirical discussion about the sea and IR, offering novel takes on the spatiality of world politics by highlighting theoretical puzzles, analysing broad historical perspectives and addressing contemporary challenges. In bringing the sea back into IR, The sea and International Relations reconceptualises the canvas of IR to include the oceans not only as travel time, but as a social, political, economic and military space which affects the workings of world politics. As such, The sea and International Relations is as ambitious as it is timely. Together, the contributions to the volume emphasise the pressing need to think of the world with the sea rather than ignoring it in order to address not only the ecological fate of the globe, but changing forms of international order.
At seven o’clock on the morning of 1 December 1756, the French privateer La Machaut crossed paths with an Irish trading vessel, the Europa of Dublin, on its voyage from Kingston, Jamaica, to Holyhead and Dublin. The Europa carried a typical Jamaican cargo of sugar, rum, cotton, coffee, logwood, pimiento and mahogany plank. ‘Flying French
Governors did all they could to encourage commerce with Spanish America. its Crown continued to attempt to exclude all foreigners from its markets other than a licensed slave trade, or asiento . 25 Many Jamaican traders responded by resorting to plunder. Privateering required little start-up capital and it was easy to recruit crews from the pool of restless men roaming in the
Modyford and Sir Henry Morgan with the support of more ‘mercantilist’ imperial agents like the duke of Albemarle, this faction promoted Stuart programmes of imperial expansion and bullion extraction through privateering and treasure hunting. 35 They actively pursued the acquisition of new colonies, taking the islands of Providence from the Spanish in 1665, Saba and St Eustasia from the Dutch in the same year, and sending an expedition to expel the Carib Indians from St Lucia in 1667. Into the 1670s they continued to assure supporters in England that, if given the
Palatinate, the crucible of the Thirty Years War, and the Providence Island Company. The second mission, contracted to the powerful maritime Rainsborough family, was intended to attack pirates at their base in Algiers. This mission had most recently been discussed by Parliament on 9 February 1642 and three ships in the process of being fitted out for Algiers were made available for the time being to Parliament, for service in Irish waters.34 The legal basis for issuing parliamentary letters of marque for a privateering mission, without troubling the king or the privy
: privateering and medical practice I will begin with a discussion of the material culture that evolved out of the maritime history of the Caribbean and then demonstrate how medicine emerged from that material culture. Prospection was key to the emergence of a medical practice which was derived from the search for bullion and minerals, and which formed an important part of European medical practice in the West Indies. This was distinct from the use of minerals in European medicine, which emerged from a different iatrochemical
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.