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• 1 media/IMAGE Map of Madagascar.jpg 2017-12-06T11:57:47-08:00 [Contemporary Docs] "By the King, a Proclamation for the more Effectual Reducing and Suppressing of Pirates and Privateers in America" 4 plain 2017-12-30T14:15:58-08:00 The English government had long supported the pirates and sponsored the privateers; Queen Elizabeth I had herself invested in Sir Francis Drake's notorious raids against Spanish ships and colonies.   By the late seventeenth century, however, it was clear that smash-and-grab economics were no longer the focus;  far greater capital was promised by the second wave of new world economics, specifically cultivation of plantations, the accompanying slave trade and the colonization and development of new markets.  
  
  Correspondingly, demographics of piracy had shifted from the “highest functionaries of the state (in the late sixteenth century), to big merchants (in the early to middle seventeenth century), to smaller, usually colonial merchants (in the late seventeenth century), and finally to the common men of the deep (in the early eighteenth century)" (Linebaugh and Rediker 156) 
   

  State policy shifted to support the new, imperial view of the seas, where they needed as vital, stable conduits to the far-reaching outposts of developing empires. Piracy was far too unstable a variable -- and it was also far less necessary to England as the Royal Navy had increased in size threefold in the time of Cromwell, and the growing English East India Company was proving adept at arming its own vessels.  
  
  A document that clearly illustrates the shifting state of affairs is posted below: "Proclamation for the more Effectual Reducing and Suppressing of Pirates and Privateers in America" [1688].  A version with modern spelling and type can be viewed at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?cc=eebo;c=eebo;idno=a46576.0001.001;page=root;view=text