According to the anonymous composer of ‘The Pirates of 1822’, cited at the beginning of this book, the British government was guilty of neglect. While British subjects were perishing in ‘blood-stain'd graves’, the government was failing to provide ‘a sure defence against the foe’. Historians might be accused of showing a similar, albeit less catastrophic, neglect for Britain's experience of privateering and piracy during the Spanish American revolutions. This upsurge in nineteenth-century maritime predation has been omitted from or marginalised in general histories of commerce-raiding, while the handful of works that do address the subject have confused the chief characteristics of privateering and piracy and ignored their impact on Britain and the British government's responses. This study has endeavoured to correct such deficiencies. The following section summarises the main findings of the work and highlights the contributions made to broader areas of historiographical debate.

Privateering and piracy were practised on a significant scale during the Spanish American Wars of Independence. In the two decades following the outbreak of the Spanish American revolutions, insurgent and Spanish privateers, along with Cuban-based pirates, initiated more than 1600 prize actions. Raids were conducted throughout the Atlantic world in a range of different vessels, from heavily armed private men-of-war to small open craft manned by only a handful of seafarers. This study has argued that the character of this prize-taking activity can only be understood with reference to the complicated context within which it took place.