Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury

Abstract

worked differently in Spanish courts, where pursuing justice against the women passengers’ assailants was essential to prosecuting pirates, and in British courts, where the law on rape required a woman to resist physically and vocally throughout an attack. Anything less was seen as consent. As a result, the women’s experience was passed over in the press, lest their reputations be sullied by noting their abuse. The women’s role in rescuing the ship was ignored, too. Craze’s account is less successful, however, in fitting the Defensor de Pedro pirates into the geopolitics of the 1820s Atlantic. Though Craze sketches out several centres of piracy – in South America, out of Cuba and Puerto Rico, from the United States – discussing them all together gives the impression that these maritime predators were all released by the Spanish American Wars of Independence and subsequent conflicts such as the Cisplatine War (1825–1828) between Brazil and what is now Argentina. There is a correlation here. The Spanish American wars did launch many privateers that could morph into pirates. But newspapers, Craze’s frequent source in these sections, tended to lump everyone together, without teasing out who did what to whom on what authority. ‘Pirate’ in this sense was more of an all-purpose put down, not a legal category. Given the dearth of attention paid to pirates after the eighteenth century, Atlantic Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century is a welcome addition to the literature of piracy. The book not only reveals that piracy persisted longer than is often appreciated, but that it was still something that challenged international relations – and fired imaginations.