Session Abstract

Despite all their plundering over the centuries, China’s pirates have captured little attention from historians. Compared to the considerable literature on Western pirates, their Asian counterparts are surprisingly seldom studied. This neglect stands in marked contrast to the actual occurrence of piracy in the region’s history, especially the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when there were tens of thousands of maritime raiders active in Chinese waters. It would not be an exaggeration to say that piracy in the early modern period was predominantly an Asian phenomenon. As elsewhere in the world, Chinese piracy was the inescapable companion to seafaring. Contemporary sources not only elucidate the threat or incidence of piracy but also governmental responses to it. Consequently, histories that do not regard the historical reality of endemic piracy neglect a crucial part of the story, one that contemporaries did not fail to heed.

Discussions of piracy inevitably involve explorations of an extraordinary range of lived experiences not only of the individuals labeled pirates but also of victims and officials. The three papers in this panel explore the varieties and vagaries of what contemporary writers and today’s historians have called piracy. They not only shed new light on the piratical activities but also on the reactions against and acquiescences in piracy by disparate polities in the region. Piracy played a key role in both the economics and politics of this era. As Ivy Lim explains, in handling the piracy crisis in the mid-sixteenth century Ming court officials adopted pragmatic policies that heeded the concerns of local officials, gentry, and merchants living on the southern littoral. Coastal security was in fact a central concern of both the center and the periphery. The papers by Robert Antony and Xing Hang advance the story into the next century, during the turbulent Ming-Qing dynastic wars and a time of rampant piracy. While Antony addresses questions about what constituted piracy along the Sino-Vietnamese water frontier in a time of anarchy, Xing Hang argues that the Zheng regime on Taiwan used maritime raiding as a conduit for asserting extraterritorial control over trading routes and ports across the South China Sea. Challenging conventional wisdom, these three papers place piracy at the center of historical discourse on Asia's maritime.