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Abstract

This dissertation investigates the way local officials subverted the Elizabethan state’s authority in cases of piracy. Using archival documents now housed in Southampton record office, this study aims to show how the state’s role in the local investigation of piracy was crippled by obstinate officials and contorted by peripheral self-management. The geography of piracy governance and the prospect that there were considerable regional variances in prosecution, and local officials’ willingness to implement the law, has been largely ignored by historians. By examining the spatial dimensions of piracy governance, through Hampshire as a case-study, this dissertation demonstrates the disinclination on the periphery to enforce national piracy law.
This study aims to partly correct the notion that piracy was the crime of an individual at sea; by examining the papers of Richard Waterton, the town clerk of Southampton, it will demonstrate the need to understand piracy as an illicit activity protected by an onshore fraternity. The reluctance of officials on the periphery to properly, or at all, perform their role in piracy law requires historians to rethink officials’ obligation in regional governance, the structure in which the law was reformed, and about the reach of the state in the sixteenth century.

Course: History - BA (Hons) - C1087

Date Deposited: 2021-07-01

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13692.html