This book contains pirates. But it is not a book primarily about pirates. Instead, this book focuses on the groups and individuals engaged in British colonial and commercial enterprise in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans who sought to suppress piracy. Following the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and especially between 1716 and 1726, a significant maritime population were stimulated by changing circumstances to turn to piracy and voyage to different regions in pursuit of plunder and opportunity. In the process, pirates encountered, obstructed and antagonised diverse participants of empire, who responded using the available resources – whether naval, administrative, or legislative – to protect specific trades and waterways from piracy. In shifting the perspective from pirates to anti-piracy campaigns, Suppressing Piracy argues that there was no coordinated war on piracy in the early eighteenth century. Instead, a series of fragmented and distinctive campaigns, shaped and influenced by events occurring in Europe and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, slowly reduced and isolated Atlantic pirates. Far from the concerted and premeditated enterprise embraced by existing accounts of British anti-piracy campaigns, this was in fact a sequential process that occurred only as state, merchant and colonial actors reacted to the impact and threat of piracy in different regions of the Greater Caribbean, North America, West Africa and the Indian Ocean. British imperial authority was shaped within and across these spaces through the multilateral web of connections that linked these groups.

As the Introduction outlines, eighteenth-century pirates operated under distinctly different circumstances than their seventeenth-century counterparts. This occurred as the lines between the licit act of privateering and the illicit act of piracy became more sharply delineated in British colonial law at the turn of the century, at the same time that a more coherent and beneficial British imperial framework was emerging. This resulted in declining opportunities for pirates as the legal framework became more rigid (at least, in theory) and alternative markets became less important to developing colonial economies. As a result, early eighteenth-century Atlantic pirates found themselves more ostracised from British colonial ports and, as we shall see, faced a more hostile environment in the various regions in which they sailed.