The Centre for Law and History Research (Law and History Network) presents a seminar given by Graham Moore

Confederacy, treason, or robbery? Defining piracy in the seventeenth-century High Court of Admiralty

Online seminar: free of charge but booking essential


Modern definitions of piracy focus on the crime as an act of robbery or violence committed on the high seas (UNCLOS, 1982). This was also true historically, where piracy was considered a felony and a ‘pirate’ was likely to be indicted on the premise of either spoil or murder. However, during the seventeenth century, conceptions of piracy also drew heavily on ideas about treason and ‘confederacy’. As an act of unsanctioned maritime violence, piracy was a violation of the relationship between sovereign and subject. Reframing piracy as an act of treason offered contemporary jurists and observers an opportunity to consider emergent ideas about state-formation and national identities in an increasingly global maritime world. This paper examines different conceptualisations of piracy in the early seventeenth century, using evidence from the High Court of Admiralty.

Speaker: Graham Moore, The National Archives
Graham Moore is an Eighteenth-Century Collections Researcher at The National Archives. He wrote his 2024 doctoral thesis on piracy and the criminal records of the Jacobean High Court of Admiralty, as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme between the University of Reading and The National Archives.