Figure 1: A 1740 map by Jacques Nicolas Bellin showing the Persian coast and India's western seaboard. The Malabar Coast, on the southwestern verge of the Indian peninsula, had been home to sea rovers since ancient times.
To the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange identified by Adam Smith may well be added the complementary proclivity to rob, pilfer, and extort. Yet, even though the history of commerce is inextricably linked to coercion, their relationship is rarely problematized. This is most apparent in the case of seaborne raiding, commonly described as piracy. In recent years, the study of the maritime sphere has increasingly highlighted the pervasiveness of piracy across different regions and over time.1 In the case of the Indian Ocean, however, not only does a comprehensive history of piracy remain to be written, but even the conceptual engagement with the topic has proven to be “a surprisingly controversial matter.”2 This controversy is rooted in two key issues: the relationship of piracy to sovereignty, on the one hand, and to trade, on the other.
Accounts of travel and trade in the Indian Ocean are rife with pirates. This is especially evident in sources dealing with the period from the twelfth century onward, which saw a marked expansion of seaborne trade across the ocean. The frequent references to the experience or perceived threat of pirate attacks within these sources stand in curious contrast to the historiography of the pre-European Indian Ocean, which propagates a vision of a peaceful maritime milieu unmarred by violence. Fernand Braudel, for instance, wrote that the maritime customs of the Indian Ocean “had always been extremely pacific.”3 This view was shared by K. M. Panikkar, who claimed that prior to the coming of the Portuguese, the ocean had enjoyed a “complete freedom of trade and navigation,” with “no interference of any kind with trade which was open to ships of all nations.”4 In a similar vein, Janet Abu-Lughod identifies “long centuries of relative peace and tolerance” in the ocean's history.5 Accordingly, much of the literature has tended to portray piracy as a perennial aberration to this presumed tranquility, as an irrepressible “maritime macroparasitism” that emerged organically wherever a juicy host presented itself.6 In this view, pirates are seen almost as a natural occurrence, without any concrete sense of agency or indeed history.
The failure to acknowledge piracy as a systemic feature of the premodern Indian Ocean world is rooted in false preconceptions that have been derived from the history of Europe. The key criterion by which piracy has been evaluated is organization. The question of organization is at the heart of the legal definition of piracy as well as political and economic models for its analysis. And by this measure, historians have found Asian piracy wanting in comparison to the quality of maritime violence ascribed to the European interlopers. Maritime violence in Asian waters before the sixteenth century has been downplayed because it does not conform to archetypes based in Europe's historical experience of Mediterranean corsairing and Caribbean privateering. As a result, Indian Ocean pirates are more likely to be portrayed as pests than as political actors. The very term “pirate” already carries this implication. The prevailing definition of piracy is the product of a European legal tradition going back to Roman law, which classes the pirate as hostis humani generis.7 In its explication in modern international law, piracy has come to be defined as “acts of violence done upon the ocean … by a body of men acting independently of any politically organised society.”8 The legal definition of piracy, therefore, hinges on the absence of political organization and affiliation. Historians likewise have put the question of political organization at the center of their engagement with piracy. Michael Pearson, who argues that “the Portuguese introduced politics into the Indian Ocean,” differentiates between pirates, who act autonomously, and corsairs, who are defined by their connection to a political entity.9 While this distinction is of some merit in thinking about piracy conceptually, it quickly breaks down when applied analytically to a case study. The problem lies in the ambiguity of what is understood as a political entity in the face of contested interpretations about the nature of the premodern state.
This problem is similarly evident in the category of “privateer,” which is used to denote robbers at sea who carry a letter of marque from a sovereign state.10 Given that privateers are thus differentiated from mere pirates by their possession of a legal document issued by a recognized polity—or rather, an entity that recognizably conforms to the European model of statehood—it is not surprising that European sea raiders in the Indian Ocean are almost always classified as privateers, while Asian marauders with differing indigenous modes of political organization are classed as pirates. The implications of this mode of analysis are profound: in an unfortunate echo of the chroniclers of European imperialism, it places Asian pirates into a realm of illegitimacy and subversion. What is more, it has caused these notions to be projected back into the region's precolonial past, thereby distorting our understanding of the social, economic, and political dynamics of maritime violence in Indian Ocean history.
In her study of Maltese pirates, Molly Greene seeks to move beyond “the traditional story told about Mediterranean piracy in the early modern period, which usually considers it from the point of view of the state and its struggle for hegemony.”11 The story told about pirates in the Indian Ocean likewise needs to shift its perspective away from a central preoccupation with the state, complicated as it is by exogenous conceptions of statehood derived from Europe's historical experience. Taking local understandings and practices of maritime violence as a point of departure suggests an alternative model for interpreting the role of piracy in the trade and politics of the western Indian Ocean. The history of piracy on the Malabar Coast offers a particularly illuminating case study for this approach. Malabar, a historical region on the southwestern verge of the Indian peninsula, was of immense importance in oceanic commerce on account of its near-monopoly on the production of black pepper and its role as a central transshipment hub within the system of monsoon navigation.12 Crucially, it was also home to prominent groups of pirates, whose history is traced from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, when Malabar became the major test case for Portugal's imperial ambitions in Asian waters. Extending the discussion into the sixteenth century shows that the arrival of the Portuguese intensified indigenous piracy, especially by Muslims, but that this development is best understood not as a watershed but in the light of the region's preexisting patterns of maritime violence and predation. These indigenous conceptions operative on and around the Malabar Coast, both before and after the irruption of Portuguese fleets, call into question the utility of European legal and political concepts as historical categories for the study of maritime violence in the western Indian Ocean.
Situating Malabar's pirates within their specific local sociopolitical settings reveals them as autonomously organized, caste-contained communities with only loose affiliations to larger political structures. This context highlights the severe shortcomings of defining piracy exclusively through reference to conventional models of sovereignty and legitimacy. Further to the question of political organization, the second issue on which controversies around piracy have centered is the relationship between piracy and trade. The interplay between pirate communities and the commercial world was much more complex than the image of the pirate-as-parasite would admit. Through both direct involvement and indirect investments, pirates and merchants frequently interacted, exchanged roles, and generally profited from each other's endeavors. These findings directly support the conceptual reassessment of piracy championed in a major study of Mediterranean history by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, which sees pirates as existing “in profound symbiosis” with the world of trade rather than as constituting its antithesis.13 Revisiting the question of sovereignty by focusing on the emergence of new political alliances between Malabari pirates and states in the sixteenth century challenges the view that the transformation of ocean space into areas of contested sovereignty, and the use of private agents as the means of such contestation, was a uniquely European phenomenon.14 Instead, the Indian Ocean region emerges not as the passive recipient of new European forms of armed trade and extortion but as subject to analogous global dynamics of maritime violence that pivoted around the twin concerns of trade and sovereignty.
The earliest references to Malabar's maritime trade coincide with the first notices of its pirates. Pliny the Elder describes how Roman vessels bound for the Malabar Coast in the first century carried companies of archers on board because its waters were “greatly infested with pirates.”15 He specifies that traders avoided the port of Muziris (identified by archaeological findings in the vicinity of the modern town of Kodungallur) on account of its pirates, preferring the greater security of ports in the south. A century later, Ptolemy again lists Muziris as among the notorious pirate ports of southwestern India, while the Peutingerian Tables confirm the persistence of piracy in that region into the third century.16
Malabar's reputation for piracy outlasted the first millennium. The Geniza records for the eleventh and twelfth centuries make frequent mention of pirate raids in this region; one ill-fated merchant was robbed both on his way from Aden to India and on his return journey.17 Marco Polo's travelogue provides the earliest detailed description of the operation of the Malabari pirates:
And you must know that from this kingdom of Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruize. These pirates take with them their wives and children, and stay out the whole summer. Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon [il font eschiel en la mer], that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them.18
This account yields two germane implications. First, the large number of ships and their elaborate modus operandi call into question the notion that these pirates were essentially unorganized. Second, their tactics of conjoined reconnaissance and attack, combined with the observation that they went out for the entire sailing season together with their wives and children, show that piracy was a communal activity.19 This description is suggestive of seafaring communities practicing seasonal piracy as part of their overall economic portfolio. Such communities are also documented for other Indian Ocean regions.20
Some fifty years later, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battūtah likewise noted the coordinated nature of pirate attacks on the Malabar Coast: a ship he was traveling on was set upon by a fleet of twelve warships (“markabān harbiyah”).21 Here and elsewhere, he stressed that the Malabari pirates were Indian infidels (“alhinūd wa-kuffārhum”), meaning Hindus.22 In the mid-fifteenth century, the Russian wanderer Athanasius Nikitin also spoke of the Malabar Coast as “infested with pirates, all of whom are Kofars, neither Christians nor Mussulmans; they pray to stone idols and know not Christ.”23 And later in the fifteenth century, the Arab navigator Ibn Mājid issued this warning in his nautical manual:
Beware of the al-Kābkūrī in these places [around Calicut], for they come here sometimes, although their original habitat is between Kōshī [Cochin] and Kūlam [Quilon] where there is a large bay. They are a people ruled by their own rulers and number about a 1000 men and are a people of both land and sea with small boats.24
Ibn Mājid's account is important in confirming the impression of sizable communities of seasonal pirates (“people of both land and sea”) roving the Malabar Coast. The seasonality of their nautical exploits was of course imposed by the pattern of the monsoons that defined the sailing seasons. What is more, he specifies that they practiced a form of autonomous political organization (“ruled by their own rulers”)—that is, the very feature by the absence of which pirates are conventionally defined.
Relating these descriptions to South Indian social history suggests that these pirates were members of the Mukkuvar caste. The Mukkuvar are traditionally known as the sea fishermen of the Malabar Coast. Colonial ethnographers frequently noted their semi-autonomous political organization, centered on headmen from within the caste.25 Duarte Barbosa, writing at the beginning of the sixteenth century, describes the Mukkuvar as both “expert seamen” and “shameless thieves.”26 In his account of a minor port midway between Quilon and Cochin, precisely in the region identified just a decade earlier by Ibn Mājid as the “original habitat” of the pirates, he adds:
[There] dwell many Heathen fishers whose livelihood in the winter season is nought but fishery, and in the summer they live by robbery of all they can find, and everything they can take on the sea. They make use of small rowing vessels like a bargatim. They are great oarsmen and a multitude of them gather together all armed with bows and arrows in plenty, and thus they surround any vessel they find becalmed, with flights of arrows until they take and rob it.27
Portuguese sources testify to the Mukkuvar's continued involvement in maritime violence throughout the sixteenth century. Tomé Pires, for instance, notes their piratical exploits and comments on the martial character of their communities. He also stresses the Mukkuvar's autonomous political organization, at the top of which were their own headmen (arayals).28
These accounts of autonomously organized, caste-contained communities specializing in seasonal maritime violence on the Malabar Coast correspond to descriptions of other marginal communities in medieval India. David Shulman, for example, argues that the pattern of “quasi-sedentary, quasi-predatory existence, or of a regular alternation between these two styles,” is an ancient one in India.29 Communities in peripheral areas situated between rich exchange centers frequently sought to redistribute some of the benefits of trade through the control of its routes. In Malabar, this dynamic was furthered by the strict seasonality of both sailing and agriculture, which imposed a natural rhythm on the alternation between occupations at land and sea, including piracy.30 Communities of cattle thieves and highway robbers are a familiar theme in the folk ballads and literature of medieval South India. In these, they are portrayed not as outsiders but rather as connected to the central symbols of the social order; in Shulman's words, in South India a bandit is “not ‘made’ but rather born as such.”31 The evidence suggests that pirate communities occupied a similar position in Malabar's social composition, pursuing hereditary, caste-defined, and socially recognized occupations to supplement incomes or accumulate capital.
In his classic essay on the economic consequences of organized violence, Frederic Lane juxtaposes the robber, who renders no economic service, to the organized racketeer, who sells protection against the violence he himself creates.32 This economic analysis, like the legal definition of piracy, pivots on the problematic criterion of organization. In terms of the indigenous social order, Malabar's pirates were “in-laws” rather than outlaws; but beyond their intra-communal political organization and integration into the wider social order, they can also be shown to have entertained more immediate links to coastal polities. The nature of these connections conforms to Lane's category of organized racketeering.
While piracy was a scourge to prosperous emporia such as Aden and Calicut, to ports less favored by geography or scrupulous leadership, it offered a prize opportunity to tap into the immense wealth that was traversing the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean aboard merchant ships. To such polities, maritime predation offered a “continuation of cabotage by other means.”33 The earliest Arabic sources for the Indian Ocean speak of the collusion between kings and pirates: the rapine of merchant ships served as the casus belli for the Arab conquest of Sind in the early eighth century, despite the Sindi king's protestations that it was the work of pirates who operated without his authority.34 Marco Polo condemned the connivance of rulers with pirates outright as “naughty and unworthy of a king,” a sentiment perhaps not without its irony when pronounced by a Venetian.35 His reproach was in reference to the ruler of Thana on the Konkan coast, who acquiesced in piracy in return for any horses captured.36 Contrariwise, for most Malabari rulers, the revenues available from taxing the pepper trade outweighed the potential spoils from indulging in piracy. In fact, the most prosperous of Malabar's ports, Calicut, owed its commercial preeminence to its strong reputation for protecting and enforcing property rights.37 A rare instance of the participation of a Malabari potentate in piracy before the sixteenth century can be found in Ibn Battūtah's travelogue. It states that the Hindu ruler of Barkur (“Fākanūr”) “possesses about thirty warships, commanded by a Muslim called Lūlā, an evildoer who robs at sea and plunders merchants on the sea.” The passage continues:
It is a custom of theirs that every ship that passes by a town must anchor at it and give a present to the ruler. This they call the right of the harbor [haqq al-bandar]. If anyone omits to do this, they sail out in pursuit of him, bring him to the port by force, double the tax on him, and prevent him from proceeding on his journey for as long as they wish.38
This system of enforced tribute can be seen as an indigenous precedent of the Portuguese cartaz system. The similarities are striking: both systems forced ships to call at specific ports in order to tax them; both claimed a legal underpinning; and both were ultimately founded in the threat of maritime violence. Earlier studies have pointed out that the Portuguese cartaz had indigenous precedents in safe-conduct passes issued sporadically by coastal rulers in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean—in fact, cartaz is likely a loanword from the Arabic qirtās, meaning “paper” or “document.”39 Ibn Battūtah's account of Barkur shows that the cartaz system also had a South Indian antecedent as an organized protection racket, albeit on a much more localized scale.
Such collusion of rulers in maritime violence corresponds to the category of privateering in Mediterranean and Atlantic history. But it was not only the active connivance of rulers that ensured the persistence of piracy. The political fragmentation of the Malabar Coast and the multiple ties of loyalty and suzerainty between Brahmans, kings, and local potentates would have precluded any concerted effort to eradicate piracy. The problem, of course, was that the rulers of certain ports would benefit disproportionately from the greater security of maritime commerce, while for others the payoffs from condoning piracy, in return for a share of its spoils, were more rewarding. Moreover, as became particularly apparent during the sixteenth century, pirates also represented a significant military resource that rulers could maintain at negative cost.
These contexts highlight the problems of defining piracy by the absence of political organization. The sources show that pirate communities were perceived not as outcast(e)s but as integral parts of society and as connected to states in varying constellations, including outright collusion. Not unlike the European practice of issuing letters of marque, this collusion between rulers and pirates was given a legal justification—in the case of Barkur, through an appeal to a customary law, the “right of the harbor.”40 This right is in fact also known from other South Indian ports, where it referred to the practice of plundering “any ship headed for one port but driven by God's destiny to take refuge in another.”41 The difference, of course, was that the ruler of Barkur employed forceful means to ensure that providence was more regularly in accord with his own rapacious desires.
That Malabar's pirates have not been recognized as political actors is predominantly due to the pervading influence of the European historical experience, specifically the model of the nation-state and its resultant regimes of territoriality. The assumption of absent or deficient political organization has characterized the construction of Asian piracy in European sources and historiography. Yet studies of marginal, peripheral, or in this case littoral communities must take account of indigenous modes of social and political organization. For this reason, the claim that politics were introduced to the Indian Ocean by the Portuguese must be qualified: rather, they transposed European models of sovereignty and legitimacy into the discourse on maritime violence, which have lingered far longer than their maritime empire.
Further to emplacing Malabar's pirates in their local social and political contexts, it is also necessary to consider their economic role by examining the complex interplay between violence, protection, and the market. Just as Roman sources speak of merchant vessels carrying archers for protection, numerous medieval notices confirm this same imperative for sea traders to protect themselves and their cargoes in the western Indian Ocean. Al-Muqaddasī, writing in the latter half of the tenth century, sums up this situation: “Every ship passing through [the Arabian Sea] needs to carry soldiers and men to throw Greek fire [naffātīn].”42 Marco Polo relates that merchants trading on the Malabar Coast “go so well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they don't fear the corsairs.”43 Ibn Battūtah, in his description of galleys on India's west coast, refers specifically to Abyssinian (“alhabshah”) men-at-arms as “the protectors on this sea.”44 Similarly, in his account of the Chinese junks in Calicut's harbor, he states that whenever the ship owner's factor went ashore, he was accompanied by archers and Abyssinians with javelins and swords.45 And in his account of Barkur, where the ruler forced ships to call at his port in order to extract tributary taxes, he specifies that the commander of the warships was a Muslim by the name of Lūlā. The use of florid Arabic nouns as names for slaves, especially those of African origin, is a well-known phenomenon in the medieval Islamic world, and the cognomen Lūlā (literally “pearl”) thus strongly suggests that this naval commander was a former slave.46 It is tempting to speculate that Lūlā had reached Malabar as an “Abyssinian” soldier escorting a merchant ship, and that he later used his expertise in maritime violence as an entrepreneur in the service of a local king.
There is other evidence to show that the employment of African soldiers on board trading vessels on India's west coast was as ancient as India's trade with East Africa, dating back to pre-Islamic times.47 It is therefore not surprising that the reputation of Africans as maritime warriors was already well-entrenched in pirate lore and coastal memory by the mid-fourteenth century.48 But Africans did not hold a monopoly in this sector: in his description of Quilon, Ibn Battūtah relates an incident involving “one of the Iraqi archers.”49 Some fifty years earlier, Giovanni de Monte Corvino wrote in a letter from southern India of “Saracen soldiers who carry bows.”50 As there is no indication that Muslims served as mercenaries in terrestrial warfare on the Malabar Coast, where the Hindu caste of the Nairs jealously guarded its monopoly on violence (but, on account of caste prohibitions, rarely ventured out to sea), it is plausible that such groups were also employed in protecting merchant ships, especially since archers were deemed crucial to keeping approaching pirate vessels at bay.51 These references speak to the presence of communal groups specializing in maritime protection on India's west coast who were employed by merchants to safeguard their shipments—and sometimes by rapacious rulers to expropriate them. Further study may reveal their links to wider networks of military slavery and entrepreneurship that are known in the history of northern India but have heretofore not been associated with the subcontinent's maritime sphere.
From the pirates' perspective, the commercial realm was not merely a target for their depredations. Pirates did not operate in an economic sphere entirely discrete from that of regular trade. In the absence of a comprehensive maritime law and institutions that could have enforced it, oftentimes there was no clear-cut distinction between merchants and robbers.52 The same individuals could assume different functions according to circumstance, just as an armed merchant ship could easily turn predator. Pyrard de Laval, a visitor to southern India in the early seventeenth century, writes that Malabari merchants had few scruples in purchasing goods obtained through rapine: “the merchants buy the goods filched by the others [i.e., the pirates] to sell at a higher price, even though they have been taken from their own relatives and friends.”53 He continues:
All the merchants of the coast, when they hear that the galiots of the pirates are about to come in, hold themselves in readiness to buy their goods cheap, and then they have assurance to go and sell them in the markets of the very merchants of whom they were taken. These latter frequently buy them back a second time; and though they recognise them, that matters not.54
Regular and what might be called irregular (to avoid the objurgatory term “illegitimate”) commerce frequently interacted in the same markets, such as the important riverside bazaar of Tirurangadi near Calicut. Pirates needed to sell the fruits of their enterprise in the marketplace, especially when they captured luxury or export goods for which there was no local demand. Capital accumulated from piracy could also be reinvested into regular commerce, including the highly profitable maritime trade. Pyrard gives the most detailed description of this dynamic:
When in the winter they [the pirates] return from the sea they become good merchants, going hither and thither among the neighbouring places to sell their goods, both by land and by sea, using then merchant ships that also belong to them. They often go to Goa and Cochin to sell their merchandise, and trade with the Portuguese, obtaining Portuguese passports, though in the previous summer they may have been at war.55
The incongruity of the Portuguese trading with their most inveterate opponents is a reminder of the pragmatic imperatives that commerce often imposed on all sides. In fact, the Portuguese themselves exemplify this interplay between regular and irregular, between peaceful and violent trade, better than any other group. On the one hand, in their desire to build a “pepper empire,” they were reliant on peaceable business relationships, while on the other hand they rarely missed an opportunity to exploit their comparative advantage in maritime violence. This was played out on all levels of their enterprise: institutionalized plunder under the legal pretext of the cartaz system, notorious predators in high ranks such as the infamous Diogo de Mesquita, merchantmen who turned filibusters in the face of an opportune prize, or beyond-the-pale brigands operating in the Bay of Bengal.56 This intersecting of trade and predation, violence and protection, markets and loot, however, was not unique to the Portuguese, but had long defined the maritime milieu of the western Indian Ocean.
The view that the Portuguese introduced politics into the Indian Ocean is rooted not only in the failure to recognize pirate communities as political actors in their own right, but also in the oft-repeated claim that South Asian rulers had an “aversion to sea power.”57 The classic quote rolled out to support this assertion is attributed to Bahādur Shāh of Gujarat (r. 1526–1535 and 1536–1537): “Wars at sea are matters of merchants, and of no concern to the honor of kings.”58 Such attitudes among some political elites have been interpreted as evidence that Indian potentates maintained an “indifferent neutrality” toward matters maritime.59 This alleged indifference is contrasted to Portugal's very active preoccupation with the sea, which was implicit in its projects of discovery and explicit in its imperialist discourses.
The Portuguese objective of exercising hegemony over the Indian Ocean became manifest in the cartaz-armada-cafila system. The cartaz was a pass that merchants were required to buy from the Portuguese to ensure safe conduct. It did not, however, entail the provision of actual escorts for merchant ships; rather, any ship without it was subject to confiscation by the Portuguese armadas patrolling the sea lanes. In a system that was functionally a protection racket, the Portuguese therefore sold protection against the violence they themselves threatened. While the direct tax the cartaz imposed on maritime trade was for the most part negligible, its real purpose was to control the flow of goods. By stipulating who could trade in which commodities and on what routes, the Portuguese sought to direct trade through their own ports, where they could tax it. The income from these customs duties was crucial to the revenues of the Éstado da India. It was only later in the sixteenth century that the Portuguese began escorting convoys (cafilas) of local merchant ships. Again, the main purpose was not protection against piracy but channeling indigenous shipping through Portuguese-controlled ports in order to collect customs dues.60
Figure 2: A seaborne prospect of Calicut from the 1572 Civitates Orbis Terrarum, edited by Georg Braun and engraved by Franz Hogenberg.
As the history of piracy on the Malabar Coast illustrates, maritime violence did not arrive in Asian waters with the Portuguese. Nor can it be unambiguously claimed that Indian rulers took no interest in maritime affairs. Even rulers of large agrarian territories were often dependent on maritime trade for their supply of military essentials (especially horses, but also slaves, cannon, etc.) as well as luxury commodities. Maritime transport was in many cases also the most economically efficient method of exporting agrarian surpluses, as is evident from the central role that the trade in staples held in Indian Ocean commerce.61 The importance that Indian states attached to seaborne trade is evident in the efforts of even predominantly agrarian empires such as Vijayanagara or the Delhi Sultanate to assert control over maritime outlets. In earlier centuries, the Chola emperors felt invested enough in the maritime sphere to undertake several naval forays in which the control of sea trade was a key factor. The maritime realm was without doubt central to political calculations where it represented the main source of income; the Malabar Coast, with its rival kingdoms centered on different port cities, is an obvious example. The hereditary title of Calicut's rulers, anglicized as Zamorin from samudri raja or “Lord of the Seas,” can hardly be reconciled with the view that Indian rulers saw the ocean as external to the economic and political fortunes of their realms and dynasties.
It is in this context that the developments of the sixteenth century, which has been characterized as “an age of maritime power, of authority based on the control of the seas,” must be placed.62 One of its most noticeable aspects is the dramatic increase in the involvement of Malabari Muslims in maritime violence. The struggle of Muslim seamen from the Malabar Coast against the Portuguese claim to dominion over the Indian Ocean is extensively documented and requires little further elaboration. The ferocity with which the Portuguese enforced their hegemonic claims and the resultant economic marginalization of Muslims are acknowledged as the main reasons for the dramatic increase in the involvement of Malabari Muslims in maritime violence over the sixteenth century. To this interpretation must be added the unquestionable element of religious conflict: adversae deinde res admonuerunt religionum. This is evident from the strong religious overtones in the Portuguese sources as well as from the importance that the concept of jihād acquired among Malabar's Muslims during this period. This aspect has been stressed by Stephen Dale, who describes sixteenth-century Malabar as a “typical frontier society,” in which discontented elements swelled the ranks of pirates and guerrillas to fight infidels and gain spoils.63
With respect to the question of political organization, deemed so critical to understandings of piracy, a different aspect of Muslim piracy on the sixteenth-century Malabar Coast calls for further attention: the creation and intensification of its links to local rulers. In earlier times, Muslims had interacted with Malabari states mainly as merchants, typified by their appointment to official posts related to maritime trade such as port master (shāhbandar). Muslim ships and sailors had always represented a potential military resource to Malabari rulers—as did the indigenous communities of Hindu pirates. But over the sixteenth century, the extent to which some of Malabar's potentates came to rely on especially Muslim seamen to defend their ports and protect their shipping profoundly altered their political role. These changes were ultimately founded in the tenacity of Muslim resistance against the Portuguese, which often came at a high cost.
The Portuguese fleets constituted the most awesome display of naval power on the Malabar Coast since the end of the great Ming voyages from 1405 to 1433. Though they were small in number, the Portuguese rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate their prowess, which was rooted in their superior seamanship and technology. The speed and agility of the caravels and the heavy deck-mounted artillery of the larger carracks were the basis for Portugal's comparative advantage in naval warfare.64 The Portuguese were certainly not invincible at sea, as shown in 1508 by their defeat in the battle of Chaul at the hands of the combined fleets of Egypt, Gujarat, and Calicut.65 Their decisive victory at Diu over the same adversaries in the following year, however, underlines the general trend: this engagement rendered obvious the inadequacy of large galleys against caravels and carracks in the open sea. In fact, the most effective opposition to Portuguese naval power was by lighter vessels and through tactics that avoided large-scale confrontations in open waters. The Portuguese records frequently mention attacks by small, oared boats that had been adapted for warfare.66 These country craft, described in the Portuguese sources as paráos, were ideally suited to surprise attacks, especially on lightly armed merchantmen, which were spotted via a network of “certain lofty buildings erected upon piles on the sea-shore,” where sentinels were kept to scan the horizon.67 Attacking in packs, they could encircle and board much larger ships, whose cannon, due to their cumbersome loading and aiming process, were not always an effective deterrent. Because of their agility and low draft, paráos were able to outrun pursuers by seeking refuge in Malabar's innumerable backwaters, rivers, and shallow bays, or on beaches.68 As a result of such guerrilla-style tactics, a contemporary observer noted that even after a century of their presence on the coast, the “Portuguese have not seen their way to put an end to [such attacks] from the time when they first came to the Indies to the present, and they have been oftener defeated by the Malabars than victorious over them.”69
Figure 3: A depiction of Maratha grabs attacking an English ship in the early eighteenth century. Malabari seamen had used similar country craft in their raids on Portuguese shipping. Reproduced from John Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar and an Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (London, 1907), frontispiece.
In the 1510s, Pires still described the Malabari corsairs as consisting of Hindu Mukkuvar. However, this changed significantly over the next century. An insight of singular importance into Muslim piracy on the Malabar Coast is afforded by the travelogue of François Pyrard de Laval. Pyrard traveled along the coast in the first decade of the seventeenth century after a shipwreck and lengthy imprisonment on the Maldives. As a Frenchman in a time of warfare between the House of Bourbon and the Philippine Habsburgs, he was naturally wary of falling into the hands of the Portuguese. The Malabari Muslims, on the other hand, celebrated him as their enemy's enemy. On this basis, he was able to visit the small ports where these Muslims “build their galleys, whence they sally forth, and whither they return with their booty.”70 His account is unequivocal in that these sea raiders were Muslims (“their religion is the law of Mahomet”), although they at times engaged “soldiers and Moucois [Mukkuvar] at high wages, which they advance to them to bind them to the bargain.”71 In the course of the sixteenth century, conversion to Islam by Mukkuvar appears to have intensified; it was even promoted by some Malabari rulers, including the Zamorins of Calicut, in order to man their navies.72 In light of this nexus, it is not surprising that the social and political organization of the Muslim sea raiders closely reflected that of the Mukkuvar pirates.73
However, one should not infer from this trend in proselytization that their exercise of maritime violence became predominantly motivated by religious factors. Even Zayn al-Dīn, whose famous history of the Muslims' struggle against the Portuguese otherwise puts great emphasis on defining it as a jihād, acknowledges that their motives were predominantly economic. In describing events of the 1560s, he writes of the many Portuguese ships the Muslims managed to capture. He adds, however, that they also took many ships “of the infidels [i.e., Hindus] of Gujarat and the Konkan and other places.”74
The main reason for this was that the people of the boats [āhl al-ghurabāt] were weak because they did not have much money, and therefore most of the boats were jointly owned [mushtarrak] by a group. If they did not capture enough of the infidels' money to cover their expenses, they would take whatever was there to take, even if it was the money of the Muslims, until they got from this what they had spent. [This occurred] even though the people who own the boat pledged [yuçāhidūn] at the time of their setting out that they would not subject other Muslims to this. If they took the Muslims' money, they would not return it back to its owner, and the reason is that among them there is not anyone who could govern them by force [bil-quwwah].75
This passage, all the more deserving of attention for going against the general aim of Zayn al-Dīn's text, shows that these Muslim pirates were primarily concerned with recovering their investments (and, presumably, achieving a return on them), an ambition that took precedence over any religious or political considerations. It again emphasizes the communal nature of these groups, described as “people of the boats” who conjointly own their vessels and do not recognize any external political authority. Zayn al-Dīn clearly attributes their depredations against their fellow Muslims to this lack of leadership, adding that many of them were not very pious Muslims.76 Pyrard de Laval was similarly struck by the fact that these Muslims attacked merchant shipping quite indiscriminately, plundering vessels of Christians, Hindus, and Muslims alike.77 When he asked them why they pillaged other Muslims, he received this answer: “that should not be deemed strange as to them, who were all robbers and pirates, [it was] a trade that was no dishonour to them, seeing they practiced it from father to son.”78 It is striking that rather than stressing their Muslim identity or defining themselves by their opposition to the Portuguese, these pirates understood their involvement in maritime violence primarily in terms of hereditary communal occupations, just like the caste-defined Mukkuvar pirates of earlier times. However, as Pyrard noted, the previously intra-communal recruitment was now supplemented by salaried employment (“high wages, which they advance to them”), suggesting an inchoate transformation from a purely communal to a merchant-capitalist mode of organization during the course of the sixteenth century.
This impression is further supported by Pyrard de Laval's observation that wealthy Muslim merchants regularly invested in pirate ventures. Fitting out fleets of fifty to eighty paráos was naturally an expensive undertaking, as was advancing payments to recruit sailors for the coming season; in the words of Niels Steensgard, “piracy or corsairing is a costly business, requiring entrepreneurs.”79 Muslim merchants appear to have been the main source of such investments:
[The Malabar pirates] have indeed some very rich and great Malabar [Muslim] lords, who build and equip these galiots, pay the soldiers and pressed hands, and send them to sea without budging from home themselves, except to be chiefs of a large expedition, on which occasion the booty belongs to them.80
The evidence suggests that these Muslim investors were not Arab Muslims, who had dominated the affairs of Malabar's Muslim communities in earlier times. By the second decade of the sixteenth century, many expatriate Muslims had relocated from Malabar to places such as Cairo, Aden, Hormuz, and Cambay in face of the particular enmity the Portuguese displayed toward Arabs.81 Local Muslims, known as Mappilas, seized this opportunity to carve out a larger role in Malabar's maritime commerce. This was achieved through a greater reliance on coastal and overland commerce; by trading with the Portuguese, who regarded native Muslims as a lesser evil; and by circumventing the cartaz system wherever practical.82 In the view of the Portuguese, much of the Mappila merchants' wealth stemmed from their “illegal” trade in pepper, which in turn relied on Mappila sailors.83 By drawing pirates into their sphere of influence, the Mappila merchants could use them to transport their own consignments and harass commercial rivals (including, but not limited to, the Portuguese), as well as claim a share of any loot. An incisive study by Pius Malekandathil of the links between Mappila merchants and pirates based on Portuguese records affirms this interpretation.84
Whereas previously, Malabari rulers had only a limited involvement with pirate communities operating from their territory, Pyrard's account shows that this was no longer the case by the end of the sixteenth century. First of all, the Muslim pirates had agreements with local lords of the Nair caste, who had been strengthened by their suzerains' preoccupation with the Portuguese as well as by the increased importance of the secondary ports that they controlled. Writes Pyrard:
[The pirates] have four harbours of refuge in the realms of the Nair kings … These harbours are well fortified on the sea side only, for with the Nair kings who have given them these refuges they have a good understanding, being subject to their judicature and paying them tribute. This understanding is highly profitable to these petty Nair kings.85
These four harbors were all located in the kingdom of Calicut. The Nairs' position had been augmented relative to that of their king, the Zamorin, but they still felt obliged to take up arms in Calicut's wars and to continue paying their tribute. In this manner, Calicut's kings benefited from piracy indirectly, through the tribute payments made to them by the Nairs. According to Dutch sources, this arrangement was still in place more than a century later.86
In addition, there is evidence that the Zamorins entertained direct relationships with the pirates. Pyrard relates that the pirates were “subjected to the giving of all sorts of gratifications and presents—as, for instance, to the king of Calecut.”87
I know for certain that the Samory [Zamorin] has an understanding with all the Malabar pirates, that they give him money and pay a tribute underhand. I am aware of this, from having often accompanied the captain, Cousty Hamede [a famed Mappila corsair], when he went to treat secretly with the king's officers, which he did only by night, for fear of being seen. All the other lords and captains of the Malabars do the same, as I have observed many a time, and as the king's own officers assured me: and there is good reason for it, for he assists them in all things, and provides them with money when they have none, which they repay in full and with interest.88
This secrecy was a political calculation on the part of the Zamorins, who were intermittently in treaty relations with the Portuguese. The political expediency that necessitated these treaties is described in some detail in Zayn al-Dīn's history.
This direct involvement of Calicut's rulers with pirates through the provision of capital in return for tribute can be interpreted as a result of the failure of an earlier arrangement. In 1524, a number of leading Mappila merchants had relocated from Cochin to Calicut in protest against the seizure of one of their ships by the Portuguese. Among this group were Kunjali Marakkar and his family, who came to be known as the “admirals of Calicut.”89 Initially based at Ponnani, which became the main arsenal of the kingdom of Calicut, the Kunjalis were for four generations the hereditary leaders of the Zamorins' naval forces, of which Muslim sea raiders formed the central constituent. Relying on guerrilla tactics and inspired leadership, the Kunjalis' fleets became the most formidable opponents of the Portuguese in all of western India. The history of their struggle against the Portuguese has been recounted in a number of studies.90 It is the history of their demise, however, that is of particular significance here. In 1573, the third Kunjali obtained permission from the Zamorin to establish a fortress at Putupattanam (later Kottakal) at the mouth of the Kotta River. This fort served the fourth and last Kunjali, “not only to make him secure, but also to make him so proud as to forget that he was but a vassal, and to hold himself out for a king.”91 Assuming the insignia of royalty, Kunjali IV challenged the Zamorin's suzerainty by styling himself as “King of the Malabar Muslims” and “Lord of the Indian Seas.”92 This attempt at Muslim state-building on the Malabar Coast was soon frustrated, as the Zamorin joined in with the Portuguese to defeat his erstwhile admiral rather than countenance his insubordination. While Kunjali was at first able to withstand an ill-coordinated attack, in 1600 he was overcome and executed by the Portuguese.93 It is thus not surprising that when Pyrard was on the coast only a few years later, he observed the Zamorin exercising a more direct, albeit clandestine, form of control over the Mappila pirates through his own officers rather than through proxies. At the same time, the pirates were no longer unified and directed by the leadership of the Kunjalis, which may explain the more indiscriminate nature of their depredations thereafter.
The only other instance of Muslim state-building on the Malabar Coast, by the Ali Raja dynasty of Cannanore, was also forged in a struggle over sea trade and the control of maritime violence, and it proved similarly short-lived.94 In fact, the Kunjalis had entered into a loose alliance with the Ali Rajas of Cannanore in the 1560s, linking their naval and commercial interests in joint ventures. In 1564, a cousin of the Ali Rajas by the name of Kutti Musa succeeded in evicting the Portuguese puppet ruler of the Maldives and took control of the island.95 Mappila seamen were also engaged in fighting the Portuguese in the Gulf of Mannar. It has been suggested that their military and diplomatic activities in Ceylon in the 1520s and 1530s were “a precocious attempt by the Mappilas to seize political power and to achieve control over crucial Indian routes.”96 Taken together with the abortive thalassocracies of the Kunjalis and Ali Rajas, this hints at an alternative history of political ambition (and overreach) in Asian waters founded on indigenous maritime violence.
Figure 4: The fortress of the Kunjalis at Kottakal. Reproduced from Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell, eds. and trans., The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, 2 vols. (London, 1887), 2: inset facing p. 510.
This nexus of maritime commerce, violence, and state-building strengthens arguments against “long-cherished notions concerning the separation of mercantile activity and military and political power” in early modern India.97 These instances of state-building by Muslims whose wealth and power was primarily based on maritime violence also throw up the ultimate paradox of defining piracy by the absence of political organization: so-called pirate states.98 Throughout history, polities that preyed on maritime trade, either by extorting tribute from merchants or by raiding ships, were, and continue to be, characterized as pirate states—most commonly by historians of larger empires that suffered their depredations. In many cases, such polities developed into autonomous thalassocracies. The classic “piracy cycle,” first conceptualized in Philip Gosse's The History of Piracy, outlines this trajectory. The cycle begins with small seafaring groups driven to predation by necessity or opportunism, who develop into increasingly complex organizations until they become powerful enough to enter into alliances with established states.99 The history of piracy on the Malabar Coast suggests an alternative model, in which autonomous political organization—albeit not in a form that necessarily corresponds to the paradigm of the European nation-state—provided the basis for large-scale predation rather than being its consequence. It also adds a further segment to the cycle: state formation. In his essay on the contingencies between warfare and state-building, Charles Tilly described the state as the quintessential protection racket with the added advantage of legitimacy.100 In a similar vein, Augustine of Hippo, in an oft-cited passage on the legitimacy of political authority, poses the question “what are kingdoms but great robber bands?” The history of piracy on the Malabar Coast testifies to the wisdom of Augustine's lesser-known argumentum e contrario, in which he asks “and what are robber bands but small kingdoms?”101
In the sixteenth century, Malabari seamen occupied multiple, overlapping roles involving elements of trade, piracy, privateering, and naval warfare. As maritime predation evolved into a de facto element not only of Calicut's naval warfare but also of its fiscal and commercial organization, the Mappila traders-cum-pirates became vital to the kingdom's political survival. On the side of the Muslims, this shift was shaped as much by ambitious commerçants as it was by coastal communities for whom maritime violence was either a hereditary practice or an economic opportunity in the face of an increasingly restrictive commercial environment. It is at these intersections of trade and predation, emporia and coastal communities, and resistance and state-building that the history of Malabar's pirates is to be written.
The history of Malabar's pirates challenges the view of the Indian Ocean as a sea in pacific contentment before the sixteenth century. Paradoxically, this notion originated in the historiography for the subsequent period of European expansion in Asian waters. Although of differing provenance and contrasting agendas, studies dealing with the region's maritime history after 1498—a period no longer designated as the “Vasco da Gama epoch,” but still conceived primarily in terms of European agency—share the juxtaposition of a peaceful premodern Indian Ocean to a militarized early modern Indian Ocean shaped by Europeans. One strand, made up of histories of European expansion and colonial enterprise, has tended to contrast a static and timeless Orient with the dynamic and transformative Sturm und Drang emanating from Europe's Atlantic peripheries. Another strand, characterized by anticolonial and nationalist histories written in reaction against imperial mythologies and Eurocentric accounts, has inadvertently reinforced this view. Their narratives of colonialist aggression also posit it against the backdrop of a traditionally tranquil and tolerant maritime milieu. In their combination, these scholarly agendas have served to reinforce the notion that 1498 marks a watershed in the history of the Indian Ocean, encapsulated in the alleged mutation of trade from peaceful to armed and of maritime violence from unorganized to systematic.
These historiographies have not only understated the significance of piracy but also distorted views of pirates. Many of the pioneering studies of Indian Ocean trade adopted uncritically from European sources the construction of Asian pirates as illegitimate and subversive. A particular problem is these sources' tendency to perceive friendly relations with Hindus and confrontation with Muslims, who as a result were more likely to be portrayed as pirates.102 The most prolific accounts of sixteenth-century Indian marauders were written by their enemies, the Portuguese, which have produced a hegemonic canon that projects onto indigenous pirates “the warlike, subaltern sign of the native” to the extent of rendering this discourse itself “a form of defensive warfare.”103 As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his study of the Spanish in America, the legal sophistry underlying European imperialism defined the nature of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous communities, who came to be assigned “the marks of outlaws or rebels.”104 In the case of India, this process culminated in the nineteenth century, when British ethnographers and colonial officials designated entire castes as “criminal tribes” in order to exclude them from the colonial legal order and institutionalize their marginalization and persecution.105 This was also true of India's maritime communities, whose categorization as subversive and criminal was pioneered by the Portuguese and “merely taken to its logical conclusion” under the English East India Company and the British Raj.106
In the years following independence, Indian nationalist historians challenged this discourse by reclaiming Indian pirates as heroic guerrilla fighters whose purported proto-nationalism induced them to oppose Western colonialism.107 Subsequent studies have highlighted other aspects of Indian piracy in the sixteenth century and beyond, such as religious motivation—identified in the rhetoric of holy war among Muslim groups—and the forging of new political ties. These perspectives have also informed more recent Western scholarship in its reevaluation of Portugal's maritime empire as a vast protection racket that self-servingly misconstrued regular Asian traders as smugglers and pirates. But as with the idea of an idyllic precolonial Indian Ocean, these contributions have again served to presume the arrival of the Portuguese as a critical turning point in the ocean's regime of maritime violence. As the history of its pirates shows, however, the Indian Ocean was a violent place long before caravels and carracks appeared on its horizon. Although the arrival of European fleets without doubt heralded a quantitative upsurge in maritime violence, they were not the harbingers of a new and wholly unprecedented political quality to these violent encounters at sea: what they brought was a lot more of the same.
Rather than revealing fundamental differences between Asian and European regimes of maritime violence, this reassessment points toward important parallels. The complex interplay of autonomous, community-based sea raiding with shifting patterns of commercial interdependence and political affiliation is a feature familiar from Europe's maritime past, be it in the form of Cilician pirates, Viking raiders, or Barbary corsairs. In their study of Mediterranean history, Horden and Purcell note that “supposedly classic pirate zones are actually typical clusters of intensely fragmented microecologies, cut off from their hinterlands by difficult relief, but with easy access to the milieu of connectivity through anchorage and coves as numerous as the microregions which they serve.”108 This characterization applies equally to Malabar's most notorious pirate regions, which did not have ready access to the pepper-producing hinterlands but were able to tap into the “milieu of connectivity” in their coastal waters.
Not only the geographic and economic conditions that gave rise to piracy but also its organizational manifestations are comparable across the two regions. As in the Indian Ocean, maritime violence in medieval Europe was “democratized, marketized, and internationalized.”109 European and Asian rulers alike routinely resorted to licensing pirates in order to extort tribute from traders or conduct a guerre de course against commercial rivals.110 Even more formal naval wars were commonly waged by private means, by sanctioning, employing, or otherwise marshaling communities who specialized in violence at sea. The resulting systems of maritime violence in the Mediterranean Sea and Europe's Atlantic periphery closely resembled those encountered in the Indian Ocean. Studies in European maritime history routinely point out “how difficult it is to distinguish unadorned theft and murder at sea from the same acts dignified by some sort of commission that made them part of a low level but officially sanctioned warfare.”111 It is for this perceived lack of officially sanctioned adornment that maritime violence in the Indian Ocean has been characterized as private criminality rather than recognized as politically organized.
This argument for global analogies in the nexus of piracy and public warfare also holds for the sixteenth century, otherwise seen as the very period in which the long-term dissimilarities between Europe's and Asia's regimes of maritime violence were brought to the fore, making possible the emergence of Europe's dominance over Asian shipping. In the same period during which European rulers sought to increasingly bring pirate communities and privateer companies under their direct control in order to monopolize extraterritorial violence, Asian potentates such as the Zamorins of Calicut embarked on a similar process. And in both cases, these endeavors met with only limited success until the eighteenth century.112 It is true, Calicut's navy never attained the level of organization or centralization that was necessary to propel the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. Nor is it known if the Zamorins ever developed a comparably elaborate legal justification for commissioning plunder. But whether Portugal's ability to disproportionately affect the patterns of oceanic trade and travel was rooted in technological, institutional, or other comparative advantages, it cannot be simply attributed to their introducing politics into the Indian Ocean world. In Europe as in Asia, “the political arithmetic of piracy,” as Marcus Rediker termed it, was determined by the same global realities of economic competition, contested sovereignties, and hegemonic designs.113 In both regions, maritime violence was not the monopoly of states, and political projects at sea were often furthered by private means, “through social institutions rather than with organisations created by states.”114
This global context underscores the limits of a theoretical distinction between private piracy and public warfare in the study of medieval and early modern violence at sea and instead exhorts a focus on tracing their continuities. Such a global perspective promises to reveal, as Molly Greene suggests, “a more conflictual and chaotic process deriving as much from the anonymous workings of countless numbers of international sojourners, be they sailors, merchants, diplomats, pirates, or soldiers, as from the imperializing projects of the European maritime powers.”115 In her study of the legal spaces of empire, Lauren Benton makes a cognate point by drawing attention to the “unruly dimensions” of imperial projects and their legal regimes, which traveled through merchants, sailors, soldiers, sojourners, and settlers as much as by doctrine.116 The heterogeneous evolution of practices and concepts of sovereignty, and especially of sovereignty at sea, was an inherently global process that spanned the early modern period, and which was fundamentally shaped by Europe's encounter and interaction with the new worlds—and seas—in the East and the West. Recovered from the misapplied standards of European historiography that dismissed them as intransigent but ultimately inconsequential pests, Malabar's pirates suggest themselves as exemplars of, and vectors in, the negotiation, constitution, and variation of these global zones of commercial interaction, political contestation, and legal reordering that came to define the early modern world.
This resurgence of maritime studies was reflected in the AHA's initiative in organizing a major conference on oceanic history in 2003; selected papers, three of which directly address the topic of piracy, were subsequently published in Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, 2007).
Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London, 2006), 56. Taking a somewhat dim view of this controversy, Sugata Bose notes that the “stigma of piracy has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and substance.” Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 43.
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (London, 1981–1984), 1: 492.
K. M. Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History (London, 1945), 35.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World-System, A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, N.Y., 1989), 276. Similar views are expressed in K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), 14; and in George F. Hourani, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, revised and expanded by John Carswell (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 61.
John L. Anderson, “Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 175; the biological metaphor is drawn from William H. McNeill, The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 6–8.
In the words of Cicero, “pirata non est ex perduellium numero definitus, sed communis hostis omnium.” Cicero, De Officiis, 3.107. On the construction of piracy in antiquity, see Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 1999). On the evolution of this tradition into modern international law, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York, N.Y., 2009); and Michael Kempe, Fluch der Weltmeere: Piraterie, Völkerrecht und internationale Beziehungen, 1500–1900 (Frankfurt, 2010).
See William Edward Hall, A Treatise on International Law, ed. A. Pearce Higgins, 7th ed. (Oxford, 1917), 27, emphasis added. Today's most widely ratified treaty on maritime law, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, defines piracy as “any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship.” UN Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea, “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” December 10, 1982, 7.101, http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf.
Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 106, 114. See also Michael Pearson, “Piracy in Asian Waters: Problems of Definition,” in Jon Kleinen and Manon Osseweijer, eds., Pirates, Ports, and Coasts in Asia: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Singapore, 2010), 15–28.
The cognate term “corsair” is used mostly in a specifically Mediterranean context, but it has also been applied to the Indian Ocean. On the use of this term in legal discourses of the medieval Mediterranean, see Emily Sohmer Thai, “Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Premodern West,” in Bentley, Bridenthal, and Wigen, Seascapes, 205–220. On its practical application, see Gonçal López Nadal, “Corsairing as a Commercial System: The Edges of Legitimate Trade,” in C. R. Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader (New York, N.Y., 2001), 125–136.
Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 8–9.
On Malabar's role in the spice trade, see Sebastian R. Prange, “‘Measuring by the bushel’: Reweighing the Indian Ocean Pepper Trade,” Historical Research 84, no. 224 (2011): 212–235.
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), 157.
See, for instance, Michael Kempe, “‘Even in the remotest corners of the world’: Globalized Piracy and International Law, 1500–1900,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 3 (2010): 353–372.
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. and trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London, 1855–1857), 6.26.
See R. N. Saletore, Indian Pirates: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Delhi, 1978), 17; S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Some Contributions of South India to Indian Culture (Calcutta, 1923), 364–365.
These documents refer to pirates as al-surrāq, literally “thieves” or “robbers.” See S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, eds. and trans., India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden, 2008), 23, 370.
Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, eds. and trans., The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, 3rd rev. ed., 2 vols. (London, 1903), 2: 389. Marco Polo's account is confused in its references to “Gozurat.” The name appears to refer to Gujarat, but from the sequence of his chapters he seems to locate it between Malabar and Thana. Moreover, he states that pepper is grown there, suggesting that he was in fact referring to the South Kanara coast.
Two Arabic accounts from the tenth and the thirteenth century also describe the seasonal roving of Indian pirates as far as the island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, where they would stay for several months while awaiting the onset of the southwest monsoon. See Al-Muqaddasī, Ahsan al-Taqāsīm fī Maçrifat al-Aqālīm, ed. M. J. de Goeje, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1906), 14; and G. Rex Smith, ed. and trans., A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujāwir's Tārīkh al-Mustabsir (London, 2008), 265.
The best-known examples are the orang suku laut (“tribe of sea people”) in today's Indonesia and the Iranun, who operated in the waters between Borneo and the Philippines. See Cynthia Chou, Indonesian Sea Nomads: Money, Magic, and Fear of the Orang Suku Laut (New York, 2002); and James Francis Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding, and the Birth of Ethnicity (Singapore, 2002).
Charles François Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, eds. and trans, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah: Texte arabe, accompagné d'une traduction, 4 vols. (Paris, 1853–1858), 4: 206. A Chinese source of the same period also warns of pirates in that region; see W. W. Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations and Trade of China with the Eastern Archipelago and the Coast of the Indian Ocean during the Fourteenth Century, Part II,” T'oung Pao, 2nd ser., 16, no. 1 (1915): 446.
Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4: 60.
Count Wielhorsky, trans., “The Travels of Athanasius Nikitin, of Twer: Voyage to India,” in R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India (London, 1858), 11.
G. R. Tibbetts, ed. and trans., Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese: Being a Translation of Kitāb al-fawāçid fī usūl al-bahr waçl-qawāçid of Ahmad b. Mājid al-Najdī (London, 1971), 202. It has not been possible to establish the etymology of the appellation “al-Kābkūrī.”.
Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, 3 vols. (London, 1807), 2: 527; C. A. Innes, Malabar Gazetteer, ed. F. B. Evans, 2 vols. (Madras, 1951), 1: 126–127; Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7 vols. (Madras, 1909), 5: 106–117. See also K. P. Padmanabha Menon, History of Kerala, ed. T. K. Krishna Menon, 4 vols. (New Delhi, 2001), 3: 460–463. On attempts by contemporary Mukkuvar communities to assert their rights as custodians of the local sea, see Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford, Calif., 2009).
Mansel Longworth Dames, ed. and trans., The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, 2 vols. (London, 1918–1921), 2: 64–65.
Ibid., 2: 96. Fernão Lopez de Castanheda also uses the term bargãtim to describe these oared coastal boats; Castanheda, Historia do descobrimento e conquista da India pelos Portugueses, new ed., 8 vols. (Lisbon, 1833), 6: 196.
Armando N. Cortesão, ed. and trans., The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, 2 vols. (London, 1944), 1: 81.
David Shulman, “On South Indian Bandits and Kings,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, no. 3 (1980): 288.
The season for sailing to western India was not only governed by the general monsoon pattern but also subject to further refinements necessary to approach the coast in full wind. See M. N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (New Delhi, 1976), 7.
See Shulman, “On South Indian Bandits,” 283. A similar dynamic is evident in the classical sources on piracy in the Aegean Sea. Thucydides, writing in the fifth century b.c.e., speaks of a time when piracy was “the main source of [the Greeks'] livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Crawley (London, 1910), 1.5.
Frederic C. Lane, “The Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,” Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (1958): 401–417.
Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 158.
Ahmad ibn Yahyā Balādhurī, Kitāb futūh al-buldān, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1866), 436. This episode is also recalled in the later Chachnāmah; see Derryl N. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind (Leiden, 1989), 65.
Yule and Cordier, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, 2: 395. On Venice's substantial investment in maritime raiding during Marco Polo's lifetime, see Irene B. Katele, “Piracy and the Venetian State: The Dilemma of Maritime Defense in the Fourteenth Century,” Speculum 63, no. 4 (1988): 865–889.
See Ranabir Chakravarti, “Horse Trade and Piracy at Tana (Thana, Maharashtra, India): Gleanings from Marco Polo,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34, no. 3 (1991): 159–182.
See Sebastian R. Prange, “The Social and Economic Organization of Muslim Trading Communities on the Malabar Coast, Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2008), 86–91.
Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4: 78–79; cf. translation in H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, trans., The Travels of Ibn Battūta, A.D. 1325–1354, 5 vols. (London, 1956–2000), 4: 808. The translation of haqq al-bandar follows Defrémery and Sanguinetti, who render this phrase as “le droit du port.” The assumption is that bandar is used in the Perso-Arabic sense of “harbor.” By contrast, Hans von Mžik, in a note to his German translation, suggests that in this instance bandar is derived from Sanskrit bhandara, “storehouse” or “treasury,” and that the “right of bandar” thus represents a formal tax rather than a customary right. See Mžik, ed. and trans., Die Reise des Arabers Ibn Batūta durch Indien und China (14. Jahrhundert) (Hamburg, 1911), 295 n. 75.
See Luis F. F. R. Thomaz, “Precedents and Parallels of the Portuguese Cartaz System,” in Pius Malekandathil and Jamal Mohammed, eds., The Portuguese, Indian Ocean, and European Bridgeheads, 1500–1800: Festschrift in Honour of Professor K. S. Mathew (Tellicherry, 2001), 67–85.
As René Barendse points out, “to understand pre-modern ‘alien’ concepts of law and politics, … one needs to disengage from the quintessentially modern and European idea that the law originates from the state.” Barendse, Arabian Seas, 1700–1763, 4 vols. (Leiden, 2009), 2: 631.
W. M. Thackston, trans., “Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi: Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar,” in Thackston, A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 304.
Al-Muqaddasī, Ahsan al-Taqāsīm fī Maçrifat al-Aqālīm, 12.
Yule and Cordier, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, 2: 389.
Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4: 59–60.
Ibid., 4: 93.
See Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh, 1989), 5; and Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Oxford, 1990), 113 n. 5.
See R. R. S. Chauhan, Africans in India: From Slavery to Royalty (New Delhi, 1995), 16; and Chandra Richard de Silva, “Indian Ocean but Not African Sea: The Erasure of East African Commerce from History,” Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 5 (1999): 684–694.
See Rahul C. Oka and Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “Siddi as Mercenary or as African Success Story on the West Coast of India,” in John C. Hawley, ed., India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms (Bloomington, Ind., 2008), 208. See also Shanti Sadiq Ali, The African Dispersal in the Deccan: From Medieval to Modern Times (Hyderabad, 1996), 157–192.
Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4: 101.
“[Ae] tra loro alchuni saracini soldanieri che portano archi.” Wilhelm Baum and Raimund Senoner, eds. and trans., Indien und Europa im Mittelalter: Die Eingliederung des Kontinents in das europäische Bewußtsein bis ins 15. Jahrhundert (Klagenfurt, 2000), 62.
Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4: 101.
In her study of cross-cultural perceptions of piracy, Patricia Risso argues that Arabic-speaking traders did not semantically denote piracy as illegal. One of her examples is the vocabulary used by Ibn Battūtah to describe robbers on both land and sea; she concludes that the reader can infer immorality from the context in which specific terms are used, but not illegality. Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 300–301. Cf. Defrémery and Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 3: 134, 4: 206, 332, 364.
Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell, eds. and trans., The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, 2 vols. (London, 1887), 1: 448–449.
Ibid., 1: 342.
Ibid., 1: 447.
See Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Minneapolis, 1977), 297 n. 38.
Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001), 47.
“As guerras do mar são cousas de mercadores, com que os Reys nom he sua honra entender.” This saying is attributed to the sultan of Gujarat in a nineteenth-century Portuguese study based on Garcia da Orta's famous Colóquios dos simples e drogas … da India of 1563; however, it is not present in da Orta's original text. Conde de Ficalho [Francisco Manuel de Melo Breyner], Garcia da Orta e o seu tempo (Lisbon, 1886), 118. See also M. N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (New Delhi, 1976), 91.
Irfan Habib, “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India,” in James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 396.
See M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge, 1987), 37–39.
See, for instance, Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 55–56.
C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London, 1969), 39.
Stephen Frederic Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Māppilas of Malabar, 1498–1922 (Oxford, 1980), 48.
See Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (London, 1965); Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London, 2001), 87–89. Peter Marshall questions the superiority of European military technology before the nineteenth century and instead draws attention to organizational and institutional factors; Marshall, “Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 13–28. For reassessments of this debate from two different perspectives and with contrasting conclusions, see Tonio Andrade, “Beyond Guns, Germs, and Steel: European Expansion and Maritime Asia, 1400–1750,” Journal of Early Modern History 14, no. 1–2 (2010): 165–186; and Philip T. Hoffman, “Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe's Comparative Advantage in Violence,” Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 39–59.
Other notable examples of the vulnerability of the Portuguese include their precarious victory at Melaka in 1511, their failure to take Aden in 1513 and Jiddah in 1517, and the defeats inflicted by Chinese fleets in 1521 and 1522.
Cortesão, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, 1: 81.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 344–345. Similar vessels were used by the corsairs harassing Portuguese shipping at Hormuz; see Walter de Gray Birch, trans., The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, 4 vols. (London, 1875), 2: 87. For another contemporary description, see Ludovico de Varthema, Reisen im Orient, trans. Folker Reichert (Sigmaringen, 1996), 169.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 345.
Ibid., 1: 446.
Ibid., 1: 447.
Ibid., 1: 444, 450.
See William Logan, William Logan's Malabar Manual: New Edition with Commentaries, ed. P. J. Cherian, 2 vols. (Thiruvananthapuram, 2000), 2: 197.
See Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 337, 341, 446, 447, 450.
Zayn al-Dīn al-Maçabarī, Tuhfah al-mujāhidīn fi baç d akhbār al-purtukālīn, British Library, MS. IO Islamic 2807e, fol. 145a.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 347, 446–447. The only difference, Pyrard adds, was that if their prize was not Portuguese, any captives were free to leave unharmed.
Ibid., 1: 347. A very similar statement by North Indian bandits in the early nineteenth century, who speak of their attaching “no idea of dishonour to this their profession,” is cited in Kim A. Wagner, “Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 353.
Niels Steensgard, “The Indian Ocean Network and the Emerging World Economy, ca. 1500–1700,” in Satish Chandra, ed., The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (New Delhi, 1987), 149.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 447–448. Pyrard makes it clear that “in speaking of the Malabars, the Mahometans are more properly intended”; ibid., 1: 341. Several decades later, an English traveler still observed that piracy was directed by land-based investors, writing that Malabar's pirates “are the worst Pickeroons on this Coast, going in Fleets, and are set out by the Great Men ashore; the Chief of whom lives at Durmapatan [Dharmapattanam].” John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, in Eight Letters: Being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672 and Finished 1681 (London, 1698), 55.
The Portuguese chronicles note that by 1511, “very few who were not natives of that place were left remaining in Calicut.” The same source also claims that after the Portuguese attack on Calicut in 1510, the Zamorin blamed the city's Muslims for “the excessive weakness they had exhibited in their defence of the city, and swore he would ruin them and cast them out of his kingdom.” Birch, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, 3: 33, 2: 72.
See Prange, “‘Measuring by the bushel,’” 229–235.
See, for instance, Birch, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, 3: 34.
Pius Malekandathil, “From Merchant Capitalists to Corsairs: The Response of the Muslim Merchants of Malabar to the Portuguese Commercial Expansion (1498–1600),” Portuguese Studies Review 12, no. 1 (2004): 75–96.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 447. The ports in question are Muttungal (“Moutingué”), Vadakara (“Badara”), and Chombal (“Chombaye”), which are all in close proximity to each other and situated about 50 kilometers north of Calicut, as well as Kasaragod (“Cangelotte”), which is located a further 150 kilometers to the north.
See Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier, 44.
Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 346.
Ibid., 1: 357.
The name is rendered as “Kunj çAlī Markār” in Zayn al-Dīn's Tuhfah al-mujāhidīn, fol. 135b.
The most comprehensive study in the English language remains O. K. Nambiar, The Kunjalis: Admirals of Calicut (London, 1963). See also M. T. Narayanan, “Kunjalis: The Muslim Admirals of Calicut,” in Ashgar Ali Engineer, ed., Kerala Muslims: A Historical Perspective (Delhi, 1995), 91–102; and Geneviève Bouchon, “Les Musulmans du Kerala à l'époque de la découverte Portugaise,” Mare Luso-Indicum 2 (1973): 52–53.
This is according to the sixteenth-century Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto, as cited in Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 2: 511.
See A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History (Kottayam, 1967), 229.
Pyrard was subsequently told that “the king of Calecut had great regret for having delivered up so valiant a man (he had done so out of anger and revenge).” Gray and Bell, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, 1: 356.
Studies on the Ali Rajas include Geneviève Bouchon, “Regent of the Sea”: Cannanore's Response to Portuguese Expansion, 1507–1528, trans. Louise Shackley (Delhi, 1988); K. K. N. Kurup, “The Ali Rajas of Cannanore: A Historiographical Study,” in Engineer, Kerala Muslims, 83–90; and Binu Mailaparambil John, “The Ali Rajas of Cannanore: Status and Identity at the Interface of Commercial and Political Expansion, 1663–1723” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leiden, 2007).
See Geneviève Bouchon, “Sixteenth Century Malabar and the Indian Ocean,” in Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, eds., India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800 (New Delhi, 1987), 179. See also “Excerpts from an Islamic History of the Maldives, Early Eighteenth Century,” in Chandra R. de Silva, ed., Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of the Discoveries (Farnham, Surrey, 2009), 199–216.
Jorge M. Flores, “The Straits of Ceylon, 1524–1539: The Portuguese-Mappilla Struggle over a Strategic Area,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 2 (1995): 64; Flores, Os portugueses e o Mar de Ceilão: Trato, diplomacia e Guerra (1498–1543) (Lisbon, 1998), chap. 4.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi, 1990), 242.
The pirate state paradigm has also been called into question by Roxani Margariti, who examines how two polities in the western Indian Ocean, Kish and Dahlak, defined their tenure over maritime space during the premodern period. Margariti, “Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and ‘Pirate’ States: Conflict and Competition in the Indian Ocean World of Trade before the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51, no. 4 (2008): 543–577.
Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (London, 1934), 1–2.
See Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), 169.
Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, 5.4. Augustine explicitly extends this argument to pirates by means of an anecdote in which a pirate is interrogated by the emperor Alexander as to his justification for molesting the seas. He replies: “The same as yours in doing it to the whole world. But because I do it with only a small ship, I am called a pirate; you, doing it with a mighty navy, are called an emperor.” Augustine thought the pirate's rejoinder both elegant and truthful.
See, for instance, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der frühen Neuzeit (1500–1750): Studien zu einer interkulturellen Konstellation (Tübingen, 1994), 256.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (London, 2004), 172.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991), 66.
See, for instance, Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi, 1998); and Anastasia Piliavsky, “A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 2 (2011): 290–313.
Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 44.
K. K. N. Kurup, “Contribution of Malabar Rulers in Delaying Dominance by Foreign Powers in Malabar Region,” in Malekandathil and Mohammed, The Portuguese, Indian Ocean, and European Bridgeheads, 117. The most prominent exemplar of this view is Nambiar's The Kunjalis, which was originally published as Portuguese Pirates and Indian Seamen (Bangalore, 1955), a title that more directly signals the thrust of its argument.
Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 158. Nicholas Rauh makes this same point in writing that “Mediterranean piracy frequently assumed a larger pattern of warfare and naval hegemony, particularly where conducted by less advantaged populations that resided in barren coastal regions bordering crucial sea-lanes.” Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates in the Roman World (Stroud, 2003), 189.
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 4.
For an examination of this issue from a Southeast and East Asian perspective, see Anthony Reid, “Violence at Sea: Unpacking ‘Piracy’ in the Claims of States over Asian Seas,” in Robert J. Antony, ed., Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas (Hong Kong, 2010), 15–26. Another case in point is the Ottoman Empire, which was active in the maritime regimes of both the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean; see, for instance, Giancarlo Casale, “Ottoman Guerre de Course and the Indian Ocean Spice Trade: The Career of Sefer Reis,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 59–79.
Susan Rose, Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000–1500 (London, 2001), 43.
See, for instance, the argument on the resurgence of Mediterranean piracy from the late sixteenth century onward in Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants.
Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004), 19. See also Franz Böni, Piraterie und Marktwirtschaft: Beitrag der Piraterie im westlichen Mittelmeer zur Schaffung einer Marktwirtschaft und Entwicklung späterer Wettbewerbsordnungen? (Konstanz, 2008).
Glete, Warfare at Sea, 2.
Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, 8.
Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 4 (2005): 701. Benton expands upon this argument in A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010), chap. 3.
Sebastian R. Prange is Assistant Professor of History and Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. After receiving his doctorate from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in 2008, he held fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the organization of Muslim trade networks in the premodern Indian Ocean.
This article was researched, written, and revised during fellowships by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the University of British Columbia, and the Zentrum Moderner Orient. It has benefited from comments offered by Daud Ali, William G. Clarence-Smith, Luke Clossey, Caroline Osella, Marcus Rediker, Daniel Vickers, David Washbrook, and the reviewers for and editors of the AHR. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain the author's sole responsibility.
