St. Augustine’s Paradox: The Rhetoric of Piracy in Critiques of Anglophone Encroachment in Spanish Territories, 1700–1900

This paper illuminates the various ways the rhetoric of piracy was used in law and literature to critique aggressive imperial expansion by British and later American forces. Since the settlement of New Spain, Spanish political leaders critiqued any English presence across the Atlantic as representing “piracy.” However, the English often criticized their own colonial ventures as a form of piracy as early as the seventeenth century. For example, the English described the Scottish settlement of the isthmus of Darien (today Panama) as piracy. At the same time, fiction writers from Jonathan Swift to Daniel Defoe repeatedly noted the piratical nature of violent expansion. This rhetoric formed the intellectual structure for later attacks upon calls for American foreign imperial incursions throughout the 19th century, particularly the filibusters of the 1850s. Debates over what was truly “piratical” about empire building questioned the legitimacy of state-sponsored violence bridging the early modern age of sail to the modern age of steam. The paper concludes with the last palpable use of piracy as a useful infamous designation with Mark Twain’s appraisal of the United States invasion of the Philippines. Twain’s biting satire suggested that the new flag of the island nation should be akin to the American flag, only turning the stripes black and white and replacing the stars with skulls and crossbones.

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