
Contents
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“What There was” “What There was”
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Trials and Errors Trials and Errors
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The Jamaica Piracy Act Gambit The Jamaica Piracy Act Gambit
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The Vice Admiralty Quandary The Vice Admiralty Quandary
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Law, Constitution, and Cultural Structure Law, Constitution, and Cultural Structure
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Four The Classification of Pirates
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Published:December 2022
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Abstract
The power to challenge piracy’s sheltering ambiguity emerged from a sequence of semiotic, legal-institutional, and political struggles in the later seventeenth century. State agents created the new interpretive infrastructure for classifying and punishing pirates in a coordinated way across the British empire through these struggles. Contemporaries advanced multiple efforts to authoritatively define piracy. But most of these strategies failed. They foundered on problems relating to a range of issues: the parcellization and delegation of sovereignty, and especially the question of whether the power to define piracy would be retained by the center or delegated to agents on the periphery; on technical points of legal procedure and jurisdiction including issues in the feud between practitioners of the common law and admiralty law; and on factional power struggles. This process of institutional development was also embedded in problems of social meaning and the content of various cultural systems, and especially on legal questions of admiralty law, jurisdiction, and procedure. It is impossible to understand this period of institutional struggle and its resulting interpretive infrastructure without an analysis of cultural context and the dynamics of social meaning that pervaded it.
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