This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.

This chapter illustrates how a potential for goods substitution may foment a strategy of playing the big powers against one another. Client states are using the threat of exit to gain leverage, and to renegotiate deals. There are signs of decline of US hegemony in the North Atlantic, and an increased potential for goods substitution by Russia and China. However, goods substitution has not been initiated by Russia and China offering what the USA or the West have ceased to offer. Rather, alternative goods provision has been sought out from below, by polities with complex post-colonial and hegemonic relationships with a variety of states. These polities are experimenting with new ways of playing the USA, Russia and China against each other. Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes exploit their strategic positions to push great powers to compete in offering a variety of public and private goods. Client states may be using the threat of substitution as strategic leverage, which drive the hegemon to renegotiate. Client leverage will be at the highest when the client can easily switch goods provider, but where the hegemon cannot easily find an alternative client.

The chapter traces the history of responsibility in the field of security through the development of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). By using the idea of ‘responsibility’ as a lens through which to assess which and whose interests, objectives, and aims the R2P was designed to advance, and how this was articulated in the inception of R2P, I show that in spite of claimed ancestry, R2P was a product of the late 1990s and the aim to address the lack of international response or intervention in the humanitarian crises of that decade. In so doing, the chapter contributes to broadening our historical account of R2P by linking and situating aspects of R2P to and alongside earlier initiatives of the 1980s.

Introduction

The history of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil and its influence on contemporary Brazil is a story of multiple legacies. In this chapter I explore these through a study of the initial Portuguese policy of settlement of the Brazilian colony.

Eager to defend its colonial lands in Brazil from foreign powers, between 1534 and 1536 the Portuguese Crown divided the land of the colony in longitudinal tracks, or slices, going from the coast to the imaginary line set by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Brazil was thus subdivided into 15 units that became known as capitanias hereditarias – hereditary captaincies. The system of hereditary captaincies would formally last only a little more than a decade, being abolished in 1549. Nevertheless, its impact on social, economic and political affairs in Brazil has been important. Each of these captaincies was given to donatários – members of the Portuguese lower nobility or bureaucrats close to João III – whose duty it became to administer the land, colonize it and protect it against foreign invasions (see Burns 1970; Skidmore 2010: 9–18). The donatários were in turn given the right to exploit most of the natural resources of their captaincy.

While this mode of imperial expansion and consolidation was officially abandoned in 1549, it continued in practice, albeit in more of a hybrid form, until 1753 when the last captaincies were subsumed into the public administration of the crown.