The cycle of privateering-becoming-piracy in the mainland American colonies partially resembled Jamaica’s. The difference between Jamaica and, say, Calvinist Massachusetts and Quaker Pennsylvania was the global stage of the latter two. Philadelphia’s and Boston’s “privateering” crews plundered all over the Red Sea, Mediterranean North Africa, and the Indian Ocean, as well as the Caribbean and the South Sea. Their targets were Muslims as well as Spaniards. In one of the most eye-opening sections of the book, Hanna shows how anti-Muslim sentiment was constitutive of continental colonial British America.
Stuart charters to the Royal African Company and the East Indies Companies sanctioned commercial monopolies over slaves in Africa and calicos and spices in India. Coastal communities in private and proprietary American colonies rejected these monopolies and attacked shipping in areas controlled by the EIC particularly. These interlopers plundered Mughal fleets in hajj to Mecca, netting immense profits, into the billions of dollars in today’s currency. The Glorious Revolution changed all this as Parliament broke these Stuart monopolies and allowed for the incorporation of a much larger base of shareholders into the EIC.
The incorporation into legal trade on slaves and calicos via the weakening of commercial monopolies and the development of tighter commercial connections between London and plantation economies in the British Atlantic allowed for the spread of imperial British civil law in the North American colonies. The Navigation Act was reformed and Admiralty judges gradually came to replace common law and jury trials in local communities. Print culture reinforced these changes and newfound cultural sensibilities. A new market for novels and literature portraying the pathologies of piracy flourished in tandem with these commercial and political developments.
Both empire and local British American communities came together under metropolitan rule into a military commercial alliance that benefited both. After the peace of Utrecht, the South Sea Company took over the Spanish asiento with the military support of both privateers from the British colonies and the British navy in order to enforce the distribution of slave and commodities in Spanish American markets in Tierra Firme. The Jenkin’s Ear War and the siege of Cartagena were as much a war waged from Boston as it was from London. Imperial reforms in the wake of the Seven Year War reintroduced many of the tensions between colonies and London that had characterized the age of piracy. All continental colonies once again reorganized privateering, this time to defeat the English.