ABSTRACT
Introduction As a study couched in the fi eld of security and criminology, this chapter makes two arguments, stemming from an epistemological and methodological problematic. Part of the problematic relates to the tendency to mistake certain enduring features of “historical” piracy (until the end of the nineteenth century) and “modern” piracy (roughly within the twentieth century but more specifi cally aft er the end of the World War II) for a set of overarching trends joining the historical past and the contemporary present. Th e argument is that while modern piracy and its historical precedent are phenomena driven by certain enduring factors and drivers, modern piracy possesses a set of distinctions important enough for security and criminological analyses to jettison any undue reference to the past.In other words, the continuities between “piracy” of the past and contemporary or “modern piracy” should not be overstated. In fact, for the security analyst and criminologist, the search for cultural and historical links is not entirely helpful for current security analyses and can even be detractive. Th e work of historians on piracy as it had existed through the ages preceding the twentieth century has been able to delve beneath what Ger Teitler calls its “public appearance” — the opposite, which would be the “private” or opaque aspects of pirates — including:
[F]acts about their organisations, international ramifi cations, culture, management style, fi nancial style, fi nancial support structure, patterns of expenditure, forms of recruitment and relations to receivers and offi - cials in legal, police or harbour circles.1
