Introduction: The Politics of Piracy, Pillaging, and Slavery

Images of piracy lie at the heart of talk about “failed states,” a term that entered the political lexicon of the United States in the early 1990s and that came to occupy a prominent place in international peace and security. While this timing suggests that the notion of failed states and its association with piracy are recent additions to political theory, I argue here that they do not originate from the context of offshore Somalia and related international interventions in the western Indian Ocean. Instead, the failed states concept and its association with piracy may be traced to nineteenth-century colonial debates about Southeast Asia.

During the nineteenth century, colonial debates about piracy in maritime Southeast Asia encompassed views that ranged from taking piracy as a sign of state dissolution, much as it appears in contemporary failed states theory, to functionalist explanations of piracy as simply inherent to how some states worked. The latter view, in which maritime marauding was seen as a practice common to Southeast Asian statecraft, typified the much earlier remarks Tomé Pires made about coastal polities in sixteenth-century Southeast Asia. Pires, a Portuguese apothecary who spent time in Malacca shortly after the Portuguese conquest in 1511, left detailed notes about the main trade items of ports throughout Southeast Asia and beyond it, as part of his effort to plot their commercial ties with Malacca. He also recorded the naval capacity of port cities throughout the maritime world of the Indian Ocean and Asia, from the Red Sea to Japan.