Heretical enemy or vanguard of commerce? The pirate in the 16th-century legal and literary imagination

Abstract

This article uses legal and literary accounts of Francis Drake’s 16th-century depredations to consider the historical figure of the pirate in legal thought. Against the transhistorical figure of universal enmity of many international legal accounts, the article argues that the 16th-century pirate was a fundamentally contested figure reflecting contrasting juridical-political visions of world order. In the 16th-century Spanish imagination, piratical enmity, rooted in confessional identity, posed a threat to a universalising res publica Christiana and the juridico-political structure of Christendom. The emergence of a nascent English commercial imperialism challenging Iberian dominance in the Americas undergirded a quite different legal and literary piratical identity, Drake not heretical foe but vanguard of English imperial aspirations.