ABSTRACT
This essay demonstrates the emergence of an approach accommodating cultural difference in international law in the context of early-modern relations between Europe and Barbary. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, most European legal scholars recognized the Barbary corsairs as lawful belligerents acting under sovereign authorization and, therefore, as distinct from pirates. This accommodating approach to the laws of war gave way to a Eurocentric and rationalist view of the international legal order in the second half of the eighteenth century, in which pirates receive a status outside the norm of international law.
