This research panel forms part of a joint research-teaching session on new methods and debates in the study of Atlantic and Caribbean piracy. Maritime predation was a feature of the early modern Atlantic from its very inception. Both licit and illicit, privateering and piracy, the use of violence at sea was a defining feature of the making of the Atlantic world. After two centuries of contest, colonisation, and exchange between the continents on its shores, however, the 18th century represents a key moment in this long history of violence at sea. Shifting rivalries in the English, French and Spanish empires, new colonial tensions, and the crystallisation of novel legal frameworks redefined longstanding practices at sea. From the spectacular florescence and equally spectacular eclipse of Anglo-American piracy in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to the predations of privateers which continued to plague Spanish Caribbean communities long after, maritime predation remained a defining feature of the contested Atlantic. The papers in this session bring new perspectives and possibilities for collaboration by shedding light on connections, consequences, and contours lurking in the long shadows of “the Golden Age of Piracy.” By crossing linguistic and imperials boundaries, forging unexpected connections, and bringing new subjects and new methods into the centre of their analysis, the session offers new insights not only into violence across Atlantic waters, but also into the larger Atlantic world that such practices created and shaped throughout the 18th century.

James Rankine presents the “Pirate History Database,” a digital platform comprising thousands of Anglophone newspaper reports of pirate activities across the Atlantic between 1680 and 1760. He contends that the database can serve as both a model and as a foundation for more reliable, comprehensive, and granular data about a phenomenon long subjected to incomplete and impressionistic assessments of its size, scope, and meaning. Centering on the second decade of the eighteenth century, Claire Steele retraces how Samuel Bellamy and his pirates’ seizure of the slave ship Whydah Gally resulted in an increased push to suppress piracy on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, she demonstrates that this suppression was deeply connected to the legal and economic might of the stakeholders financing the Whydah’s slaving voyage. Through a microhistorical focus on enslaved African-born, Afro-descendant, and Amerindian sailors, Beatriz Carolina Peña demonstrates how the wars and commercial rivalries between England and Spain produced intense privateering activity in the Greater Caribbean. The paper examines how two Spanish American sailors – classified as “Prize Negroes” – sought to regain their status as free men in colonial New York during the early 1750s.