ABSTRACT
Juxtaposing British piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Somali piracy today, this chapter examines the ways in which the moral panic around the contemporary instance functions to obscure global histories of exploitation. Defining piracy has been key to the state’s ability to define legitimate violence, Dua argues, helping states claim the legitimacy of their violence while criminalizing that of rivals or threats to their monopolies. Dua’s chapter confirms that piracy is not criminality in a failed state, as dominant framings of Somalia today would have it, but part of a long history of rent-seeking in the Indian Ocean.
