There was no coordinated war on piracy in the early eighteenth century. While piracy was consistently seen as a significant enough problem – sometimes real and sometimes imagined – to prompt regular government responses and even crown intervention, there was no organised imperial campaign against pirates operating in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. There simply was not the capacity for such a campaign, especially as piracy was a periodic rather than continuous threat across the regions that pirates targeted. While the popula-tion of pirates operating in the early eighteenth century was substantial (at least between 1716 and 1722), they were not a substantial enough population to be able to impact all regions at all times. Instead, pirates voyaged from place to place, sometimes in search of richer or more vulnerable prizes and sometimes chased by naval warships or colonial guardships. This meant that piracy was an episodic problem in different waters at different times, prompting intermittent responses within these regions by colonial bodies, mercantile groups, naval officers and London-based government agencies. Just as pirates reacted to the contexts that they faced in the distinctive regions that they targeted, those impacted by and seeking to suppress pirates reacted to their arrival using the varied marine resources and legal instruments at their disposal.

Following the sequential movements and impacts of pirates between 1716 and 1726 exposes the ways in which piracy became entangled with cognate issues surrounding commercial politics, maritime endeavour, naval power and sovereignty on the seas in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. For each theatre that pirates impacted, it was merchants and companies involved in profitable long-distance trades that prompted the British government and Admiralty to act. Piratical attacks highlighted the vulnerable nature of these regions during peacetime and, in response, British merchant groups mobilised to lobby for naval protection over the maritime spaces where their trade was conducted. This then played a central role in influencing and guiding state responses to commercial threats in extra-European waters and directly contributed to the sporadic projection of British imperial power over sea spaces. This contradicts the idea that the decline of piracy was effected by Royal Navy warships that were dispatched to hunt and exterminate pirates.