The art of prize: privateers’ legal geographies in the long eighteenth century

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the main elements of European warfare was the practice of prize-taking at sea. Sovereigns authorized their subjects to seize enemy ships and cargoes and have them judicially “condemned” to their profit. The prize system allowed sovereigns to mobilize private capital for the war effort while inflicting damage on the enemy’s economy. The system was governed by its own legal regime, “prize law,” administered by specialized tribunals. Drawing borders in the water was an essential part of what mariners and prize tribunals did. In particular, prize-takers had to distinguish the limits of territorial waters and define areas of the sea in which there was a presumption that ships were engaged in trade with an enemy port. Both types of boundary-drawing, which were largely performed by mariners, required a sophisticated synthesis of natural and political knowledges. Defining “hot zones” of enemy activity on the high seas, for example, required up-to-date information on which power controlled a given port or coastline and a precise knowledge of the winds and currents that allowed ships to travel to and from it. This paper will use two case studies, drawn from different periods and geographies (North Sea, early C18, and Caribbean, early C19), to show how actors in the prize law system combined natural and political knowledges to draw boundaries in the liquid element.

Speaker

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Professor of History, French & Italian, and Law at the University of Southern California. His most recent book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, a generational history of the Atlantic revolutionary era (1760s–1820s) was published by Basic Books (US) in February 2024 and has been widely reviewed. He is now working on two books: a history of the “Long American Revolution,” told through a study of the thousands of surviving Fourth of July orations, to appear in 2026, and a global history of maritime prize law in the making and unmaking of European empires, ca. 1600–1850, both under contract with Basic.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.