The death of liberty: The thirty years’ war and the origins of race law in the law of piracy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The essay argues that the seventeenth-century law of piracy was central for the conceptualization of “racial difference” in English legal, political, and religious discourse. In the law of piracy, race originally served to curtail the liberty of European seafarers in the Mediterranean, but was quickly used to render emerging systems of slavery more severe in the Atlantic. This essay uses an English street ballad of 1624 to illustrate and explore these entanglements. It suggests that “race” as a system of thought originates as a strategy for the violent subjection of populations constructed as non-white, but also for curtailing the political choices open to those constructed as white.