Piracy was considered a crime in international law, and British authorities felt its suppression justified the extension of state power into Asian waters. Only after the Opium War and the colonisation of Hong Kong, however, did Britain gain an interest and the wherewithal to act against pirates off the coast of South China. Ships of the Royal Navy, enforcing British ideas of international and maritime law in Chinese waters, together with the criminal justice system in Hong Kong, proved limited in their capacity to deal with piracy in South China in the mid-nineteenth century. Agents of British state power on the coast of China thus sought the assistance of their international counterparts, culminating in an international punitive expedition to Coulan. This article examines interstate cooperation in the effort to suppress piracy and the light this sheds on the relationship between piracy and state power. It argues that such collaboration required compromises between different understandings of piracy and the jurisdiction that different states had over it, and that interstate power was ultimately limited in its impact on the activities of pirates in South China.

States exert their power over maritime predation only occasionally depending on prevalent circumstances. Historically, when states have perceived and attempted to address a problem of piracy, they have encountered severe limits on their abilities to manage private maritime enterprise in waters under their purported control. Despite the popular conception that piracy falls into the legal category of ‘universal jurisdiction’, such jurisdiction has only been employed sporadically. In reality, despite high-profile ‘terror’ campaigns against pirates, states regularly employed alternative means of suppression, including negotiation, legal posturing and co-optation. The four articles in this Forum provide detailed case studies of the occasional use of state power to regulate maritime predation in diverse waters and contexts. In these examples, states respectively negotiated with maritime communities in medieval England, sought a monopoly on violence in the South China Sea, collaborated with other states to police colonial Hong Kong, and dealt diplomatically with a local pirate hero to defend New Orleans. Across each article, the ‘state’ faced a particular problem of piracy, but could only occasionally exert power to manage it.

Abstract Chinese piracy presented numerous problems for the Qing and British empires in Chinese waters, but cooperation against pirates was rare before 1842. The colonization of Hong Kong and other treaty arrangements after the Opium War enabled the British to take more vigorous action against Chinese pirates. Although such actions impinged on China’s maritime sovereignty and jurisdiction, Qing officials quickly recognized the efficacy of British naval forces in suppressing piracy. Hong Kong and Kowloon developed a system of cooperation for the suppression of piracy. This system was replicated elsewhere along the coast of Guangdong and beyond. By receiving captured pirates from the Royal Navy, Qing officials effectively used an important tool of British imperialism as a means of enforcing and extending their own authority. At the same time, cooperation became a means for the Qing to engage with emerging international law.

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