‘Putting down a common enemy’: Piracy and occasional interstate power in South China during the mid-nineteenth century

Abstract

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.

European colonisation, law, and Indigenous marine dispossession: historical perspectives on the construction and entrenchment of unequal marine governance

“…In and between proximate waters, Europeans sometimes attempted to incorporate Indigenous shipping within regulatory systems established to extend control over commercial shipping routes or to prohibit certain types of vessels and maritime practices. Indigenous maritime attacks were also portrayed as outright piracy rather than legitimate attempts to practice, maintain, expand, or reestablish Indigenous control over marine spaces (Bahar 2019;Kwan 2020a;Lipman 2015;Risso 2001).…”