The English Political And Legal Processes Essays
Their contemporaries described them as “Robbers, Opposers, and Violators of all Laws, Humane and Divine.” Many viewed themselves as a more selfish reincarnation of Robin Hood, stealing from wealthy merchants, foreign traders, and abusive captains, and in doing so, threatening the hierarchical status quo of seventeenth and eighteenth English society by declaring “war against the world.” The Law considered them hostes humani generis, enemies of all mankind. In reality, the Anglo-American pirates that plagued colonial shipping routes for over sixty years were none of those things, or perhaps more accurately, were not one but a combination them. They were all robbers, since piracy in its most elementary definition is nothing more than robbery at sea, something the English Admiralty recognized from its establishment in the fourteenth century. There was also some relevance to their self-perceptive…