ABSTRACT
The chapter sets out to counter Eurocentric bias in depictions of maritime power and violence along India’s western littoral during the period of British expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author adapts analyses of legal pluralism in maritime spaces to explore the role of piracy in Indian conceptions of power and jurisdiction at sea. Piracy was a matter of contention among Indian and British governing authorities that drew both of them into efforts to understand the phenomenon as part of local histories and traditions. Despite the efforts of some to understand piracy in this context, the British ultimately portrayed maritime predation as an ethnographic marker of a “savagery” over which their sovereignty could be asserted.
