From Bess to the New “Pirates”

Here We may now be entering an era in which states themselves rediscover why piracy was economically

useful.

Elizabeth I would have understood the attraction immediately. In the late sixteenth century England

faced a problem that would be familiar to any modern government confronting a richer and more

conventionally powerful rival: Spain possessed immense imperial resources, global commercial reach

and formidable military strength, while England lacked the means to compete symmetrically across

every theatre. The answer was not simply to build a fleet and declare war, but to blur the frontier

between commerce and conflict. Francis Drake, John Hawkins and other English seafarers operated in

the ambiguous zone between pirate, privateer, merchant adventurer and servant of the Crown.

Sometimes Elizabeth authorised them, sometimes financed them, sometimes benefited from them

while preserving enough distance to deny direct responsibility. To the English they could be celebrated

as patriots and instruments of state policy; to the Spanish merchant watching armed Englishmen climb

over his gunwale, the distinction between piracy and privateering was likely to feel rather academic.

The legal distinction was nevertheless real. A pirate acted for private gain, while a privateer operated

with state authority, usually in the form of a commission or letter of marque, which entitled him to prey

upon enemy commerce and bring captured vessels before prize courts. What made the system so

attractive, however, was not merely its legal ambiguity but its economics. England could impose costs

on Spain without bearing the entire cost of doing so. Private investors supplied ships, crews and capital,

private actors accepted much of the operational risk, successful voyages could finance themselves

through captured cargo, and the Crown could receive a share of the proceeds while forcing Spain to

spend heavily on convoying, escorting and protecting an enormous maritime empire. Privateering

therefore achieved something strategically sophisticated: it made the defence of commerce more

expensive than its attack.

That principle has never really disappeared. The destruction or seizure of a merchant ship matters not

simply because a hull and cargo are lost, but because the possibility of loss changes the behaviour of

everybody else. Insurance premiums rise, seafarers demand compensation for risk, merchants reroute,

voyages lengthen, working capital is tied up for longer, governments divert naval assets to escort duty

and freight rates incorporate the probability of disruption. The economically intelligent pirate attacks

expectations as much as ships. Once fear is priced into transportation, the damage spreads through the

system independently of whether the next vessel is ever touched.

The Barbary corsairs understood this just as clearly as Elizabethan privateers. For centuries, the North

African Barbary states supported maritime predation against commercial shipping, seizing vessels,

cargoes and crews while extracting ransom and tribute in return for safer passage. The system was not

simply random criminality at sea; it became embedded in diplomacy, finance and state power. European

governments often found it cheaper to pay than to fight, and after American independence removed US

merchant shipping from the protection previously afforded by British naval power, the new republic

discovered that formal sovereignty was of limited use if its ships could still be captured beyond the

horizon. The eventual American decision to build naval power and fight the Barbary Wars was therefore

as much an economic calculation as a strategic one: at what point does paying for protection become

preferable to paying for insecurity?

That question never vanished. What changed was that maritime security gradually became normal.

During the nineteenth century, British naval supremacy, and later the extension of American maritime

power, helped create a world in which commercial navigation became progressively separated from

routine geopolitical predation. This should not be romanticised. Britain used blockades, gunboat

diplomacy and overwhelming naval force to advance imperial interests, while the twentieth century

1brought submarine warfare, commerce raiding and catastrophic attacks on merchant shipping. Even so,

over time a powerful norm emerged: merchant vessels moving lawfully through international waters

should not simply be seized because another state disliked their cargo, owner or destination. That norm

became embedded after 1945 in a much more elaborate legal order governing the high seas.

The modern law of the sea is therefore built around a presumption of freedom rather than predation. A

ship on the high seas sails under the flag of one state and is ordinarily subject to that state’s jurisdiction,

while the right of a foreign warship to board it is tightly constrained. Piracy, slave trading, statelessness

and a limited number of other circumstances create recognised exceptions, but the underlying principle

is that navigation is not meant to depend upon whether the nearest navy happens to approve of your

commercial activity. That distinction becomes critically important when modern sanctions move from

financial restriction towards physical interdiction.

For most of the contemporary sanctions era, Western governments possessed an extraordinary

advantage because they could exercise maritime power without necessarily exercising naval power.

They sat at the centre of the commercial infrastructure surrounding global trade: dollars, banks,

insurance, reinsurance, protection and indemnity clubs, ship finance, classification, commodity trading,

ports and legal services. A tanker did not need to encounter a destroyer in order to discover that

Washington, London or Brussels objected to what it was doing. It could instead find that nobody

reputable would insure it, finance it, service it, purchase its cargo or allow it into port. This was a

remarkably sophisticated form of coercion because it converted Western dominance of global

commercial systems into geopolitical power.

Russia’s response after the invasion of Ukraine was therefore entirely predictable. If access to Western

maritime infrastructure could be weaponised, Russia needed to create or access maritime infrastructure

that could function outside Western control. Hence the growth of the so-called shadow fleet: ageing

tankers, opaque corporate structures, frequent changes of flag, obscure insurers, ship-to-ship transfers,

complicated chains of beneficial ownership and various methods of making the relationship between

Russian oil and the vessel carrying it more difficult to establish. The shadow fleet is not merely sanctions

evasion. It represents an attempt to build an alternative operating system for maritime commerce. If

London can weaponise insurance, Moscow must learn to sail without London. If Western banks can

weaponise finance, Moscow must find other banks. If European firms can weaponise services and

ownership, Russian trade must find intermediaries elsewhere. The contest is therefore not simply over

barrels of oil, but over who controls the commercial plumbing through which those barrels move.

The strategic danger increases sharply once this financial contest becomes physical. There is a profound

difference between sanctioning a vessel, boarding it, inspecting it, detaining it and confiscating it, just

as there is a profound difference between a properly flagged ship and a stateless vessel, between

territorial waters and the high seas, between flag-state consent and unilateral coercion, and between

enforcement backed by a United Nations mandate and enforcement based on national or regional

sanctions law. These distinctions are not pedantry; they are the legal architecture preventing

commercial disputes from becoming naval confrontations.

For that reason, describing every Western action against Russian-linked shipping as simply “illegal

piracy” would be too crude. The stronger argument is that Western governments are pushing sanctions

enforcement towards the boundary where economic jurisdiction meets freedom of navigation, while

Russia has every incentive to erase the legal distinctions upon which the West relies. Moscow does not

need to persuade international lawyers that every Western boarding or detention is unlawful. It merely

needs to construct a political doctrine of reciprocity: you interfere with shipping you identify as

economically ours, and we reserve the right to interfere with shipping we identify as economically

yours.

2That is why Vladimir Putin’s recent statements to the Pacific Fleet matter. The most significant element

was not the familiar rhetoric of Western hostility, but the explicit suggestion that retaliation need not

occur in the same geographical theatre in which Russian-linked vessels had been targeted. Russia could

respond wherever it judged appropriate. Once paired with the Pacific Fleet’s declaration that it had

analysed the routes, cargoes and ownership structures of vessels connected to “unfriendly” states, the

message became more strategic than rhetorical. Moscow was saying, in effect, that it had studied the

commercial geography of its adversaries and was prepared to turn that geography into leverage.

The location sharpened the point. This was not merely another Baltic confrontation. By invoking

commercial vulnerability in the Indo-Pacific, Russia was signalling that European sanctions enforcement

could generate consequences far from Europe, in waters where Western merchant traffic is dispersed

and where British or European naval protection is much thinner. The strategic logic would have been

instantly recognisable to Elizabeth I. The objective is not necessarily to defeat an adversary’s navy. It is

to force the adversary to defend a commercial system spread across too much geography.

That becomes particularly potent because the nationality of modern shipping is itself difficult to define.

Take a tanker beneficially owned by a British company, sailing under a Liberian flag, technically

managed in Greece, insured in Norway, chartered in Singapore, crewed largely by Filipinos and Indians,

carrying Brazilian crude purchased by a Chinese buyer and destined for a South Korean refinery. Russia

stops it in the Pacific and calls it British. Britain says it is Liberian. Liberia says its flag-state rights have

been violated. China demands the release of its cargo. The insurer must decide whether the incident

triggers war-risk provisions. The charterer invokes force majeure. The owner calls London. The crew

calls home. A supposedly simple act of seizing a “British ship” has suddenly become a dispute involving

international maritime law, sanctions law, insurance, contract, diplomacy, property rights and

potentially naval escalation across half a dozen jurisdictions.

That complexity is not a flaw in the system. It is how modern shipping works. The post-war maritime

economy became extraordinarily efficient precisely because capital, ownership, crews, flags, insurance

and cargo could be distributed across jurisdictions according to commercial advantage. The same ship

could belong economically to several countries while belonging legally, for navigational purposes,

primarily to one flag state. Yet once governments begin politicising commercial shipping, those

deliberately blurred identities become strategic vulnerabilities. Russia’s claim that Western countries

possess “shadow fleets” of their own is legally opportunistic, but it touches an uncomfortable truth:

opacity and multinational ownership are not unique to sanctions evasion. Much of legitimate global

shipping already exists inside a maze of flags of convenience, holding companies, charter

arrangements and beneficial ownership structures. The decisive question is not whether the structure is

opaque, but what the opacity is being used to achieve.

If governments begin defining the political identity of a merchant vessel not by flag but by ownership,

cargo, charter, previous port calls or ultimate economic beneficiary, the maritime order becomes

dramatically more unstable. A ship can suddenly acquire multiple nationalities depending upon who

wishes to stop it. Once that principle takes hold, international commerce ceases to be merely

commercial. Every voyage becomes potentially geopolitical.

The Houthis have already provided a remarkably clear demonstration of how powerful this form of

coercion can be. Their strategic impact has never depended on sinking huge numbers of vessels. It has

depended on persuading shipping companies and insurers that ships might be hit. The economic

consequences flow from the change in probability. War-risk premiums rise, shipping lines divert around

the Cape, voyages lengthen, fuel consumption increases, capacity tightens, working capital remains tied

up for longer and manufacturers begin carrying more inventory to protect themselves against

3unreliable delivery. A missile that never hits a ship can still impose costs across the global economy if it

persuades insurers and executives to behave as though the next one might.

This is the modern form of an ancient economic principle. The economically rational pirate does not

have to capture your vessel. He merely has to make Lloyd’s believe that capture, damage or destruction

has become sufficiently plausible to reprice the voyage. Once that happens, the weapon travels through

the market by itself. A missile changes the perceived probability of loss; the probability changes the

insurance premium; the premium changes the economics of the route; the route changes fuel use and

journey time; journey time changes capacity and inventory requirements; those changes alter freight

costs; and ultimately consumers who have never heard of Bab-el-Mandeb pay part of the price.

The Houthis therefore belong in the same conceptual story as Elizabethan privateers and the Barbary

corsairs, not because the actors are legally or morally equivalent, but because they expose the same

vulnerability: commerce is unusually sensitive to actors capable of pricing fear into transportation. In

many cases the direct physical damage is less important than the distributed economic consequences

of uncertainty.

That should concern Britain more than most. There is a striking historical irony in a country that once

possessed the world’s dominant navy remaining one of the world’s most important centres for maritime

finance, insurance, law and sanctions policy while possessing nothing remotely comparable to the fleet

with which it once protected its commercial reach. The Royal Navy remains highly capable, but

capability is not the same thing as mass, and maritime protection is extraordinarily demanding because

the attacker chooses where to create the problem while the defender must decide how much of the

system to protect.

British economic interests stretch from the Channel and Gibraltar through Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb,

Hormuz, the Indian Ocean, Malacca, the South China Sea, the East China Sea and into the western

Pacific. A government can participate in a sanctions regime with global reach without possessing a navy

capable of physically protecting every British-connected commercial interest exposed to retaliation

across that geography. That creates a serious strategic asymmetry. The very instruments of economic

pressure that are cheap to impose can become expensive to defend once the opponent replies

physically rather than financially.

The geography of globalisation makes this worse. For all the language of a borderless world, maritime

commerce remains constrained by a remarkably small number of narrow passages. Gibraltar, Suez, Bab-

el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca and the Taiwan Strait connect vast portions of the world economy. We

designed globalisation around efficiency: containerisation lowered costs, larger vessels produced

economies of scale, just-in-time production reduced inventories, specialised ports accelerated handling

and supply chains stretched across continents in pursuit of comparative advantage. All of this was

rational, but it quietly depended upon a security assumption. The ship would arrive. The strait would

remain open. The tanker would not be seized. The insurer would continue to price catastrophic loss as

improbable. The navy would remain in the background precisely because nothing happened.

This is where the argument intersects with the Rhine. Climate stress reveals environmental assumptions

hidden inside apparently efficient economic systems. A factory beside a river may look like an industrial

asset until falling water levels expose the fact that its economics depend upon barges being able to

reach it. Maritime geopolitical stress reveals the same fragility in a different form. We built globalisation

around security assumptions that may no longer hold.

4No country has more reason to think seriously about this than China. Beijing is simultaneously one of

the principal beneficiaries of any weakening of Western sanctions power and one of the principal

beneficiaries of a secure global maritime system. It has obvious reasons to welcome alternatives to

Western-dominated finance, insurance and trade infrastructure, because those alternatives reduce

vulnerability to American and European coercion. Yet China is also profoundly dependent upon the free

movement of energy, commodities and manufactured goods by sea. It therefore cannot comfortably

embrace a general doctrine under which a powerful state may identify commercial vessels as

economically connected to an adversary and physically detain them wherever naval power permits.

Today Russia may identify a British-owned, Liberian-flagged tanker as effectively British. Tomorrow

another state might define a Chinese-owned, Panamanian-flagged container ship as effectively Chinese.

The precedent does not remain attached to the country that first found it convenient. This creates a

deep tension in Chinese strategy. Beijing wants to weaken Western economic jurisdiction, but it also

needs freedom of navigation. It may therefore find itself increasingly forced into a role that great

trading powers have repeatedly assumed in history: not merely benefiting from maritime security, but

providing it.

That carries enormous strategic consequences. A country that wishes to protect commerce far from

home needs more than a large navy on paper. It needs bases, replenishment, long-range surveillance,

submarines, carrier groups, destroyers, frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, diplomatic agreements for

access and the ability to sustain forces across enormous distances. Naval power follows commerce

surprisingly often in history. There is little reason to assume China will be an exception.

Once China, Russia and Western powers increasingly protect their own commercial networks, the

maritime commons begins to fragment. Russian tankers receive Russian escorts. Western vessels

increasingly rely on NATO or allied naval protection in sensitive corridors. Chinese ships operate

beneath an expanding Chinese security umbrella. Insurers begin pricing geopolitical affiliation more

explicitly. Owners choose flags for strategic as well as commercial reasons. Ports discriminate.

Financiers discriminate. Cargo owners discriminate. The result is not necessarily deglobalisation, but

something more subtle and potentially more enduring: bloc globalisation.

Goods continue to move. Trade remains vast. Container ships keep sailing. Yet beneath the surface, the

shared infrastructure of global commerce fractures into overlapping security systems. Western routes,

Chinese routes, Russian routes, neutral routes and contested routes emerge, producing something

reminiscent of nineteenth-century spheres of influence, except the boundaries are increasingly drawn

across sea lanes rather than merely across territory.

At that point international law encounters the warship. Imagine again the Russian frigate ordering our

hypothetical Liberian-flagged, British-owned tanker to stop. The captain refuses. Russian sailors board.

London declares the action unlawful. Liberia protests. The owner goes to court. Insurers invoke

contractual clauses. Diplomats demand release. Lawyers produce persuasive explanations of why the

law is on their side. Yet the Russian sailors remain standing on the deck. That is the uncomfortable

relationship between law and power in international affairs. Law determines which side possesses the

stronger legal argument; power may determine whether the ship actually stops.

This does not make international law meaningless. States comply with maritime law constantly because

reciprocity, predictability, reputation and mutual interest make compliance valuable. The commercial

system could not function otherwise. The danger arises when powerful states begin deciding that

reciprocal coercion serves them better than reciprocal restraint. Russia does not need the world to

agree that every Western act of sanctions enforcement amounts to piracy. It merely needs to persuade

enough audiences that the West established a precedent of interfering with hostile commerce and that

5Moscow is therefore entitled to respond in kind. The legal arguments may be radically different, but

escalation rarely waits patiently for the lawyers.

That is how an international system governed primarily by rules begins drifting towards one governed

primarily by deterrence. The decisive question changes from “Are we legally entitled to stop your ship?”

to “Can we stop your ship without you being able to stop ours?” Once that happens, the entire

architecture of commercial security begins to change.

History suggests what follows. The convoy returns. For much of recent Western defence planning,

merchant protection has seemed almost mundane compared with aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles,

nuclear deterrence, expeditionary warfare, cyber operations and drones. Yet modern economies cannot

import semiconductors on nuclear submarines, transport two million barrels of oil aboard an F-35 or

deliver tens of thousands of containers on an aircraft carrier. The glamorous instruments of military

power ultimately exist to protect some remarkably unglamorous assets: tankers, bulk carriers,

container ships, ports and undersea cables.

If those assets become systematically vulnerable, the frigate suddenly becomes one of the most

economically important instruments a government possesses. Navies need escorts, maritime patrol

aircraft, drones, anti-submarine capability, forward bases, replenishment ships, intelligence and, above

all, numbers. Commerce is dispersed everywhere, while naval protection is finite. The twenty-first

century may therefore rediscover that protecting container ships can matter just as much as projecting

power from carrier groups.

The most dangerous element is that none of this requires governments to want a war. A tanker changes

ownership shortly before sailing. A database is outdated. Its AIS is switched off. A Russian commander

believes it is British-controlled. The captain believes international law entitles him to refuse inspection. A

warning shot is fired. It strikes the bridge. A nearby British or French warship intervenes. Russian

aircraft arrive. A radar locks on. Somebody interprets that as preparation to fire. Somebody shoots first.

Within hours governments are discussing NATO obligations, flag-state jurisdiction, proportional

response and rules of engagement because of a merchant vessel whose ultimate beneficial owner is

registered in one country, whose cargo belongs to another and whose crew comes from several more.

This is how dangerous systems develop. Escalation does not necessarily begin when political leaders

decide they want escalation. It begins when mechanisms capable of producing escalation multiply

faster than the political arrangements designed to contain them. Sanctions, shadow fleets, naval

escorts, inspections, detentions, drones, missiles, chokepoints, opaque ownership, proxy forces and

competing interpretations of international law are now interacting inside the same commercial space.

That is the real strategic risk.

Which takes us back to Bess. Elizabeth understood that invading your enemy is expensive, while

attacking the economic system that sustains him can be considerably cheaper. Make his commerce

dangerous, force him to defend it, increase his insurance costs, divert his warships, stretch his

resources and maintain enough ambiguity that every attack need not become a formal declaration of

war. The technologies have changed almost beyond recognition, but the underlying strategic logic has

not. Drake’s cannon has become the anti-ship missile and the drone; the Spanish treasure galleon has

become the supertanker and the container ship; the private merchant’s premium has become the

modern war-risk premium; and the treasure route from the Americas has become a global network of

energy corridors, container lanes and maritime chokepoints.

6The analogy should not be pushed too far. A European sanctions designation is not a letter of marque. A

Russian naval boarding is not Elizabethan privateering. A Houthi missile attack is not the same thing as

a Barbary corsair demanding tribute. Modern maritime law exists precisely because states spent

centuries trying to distinguish between those things and place commercial navigation under

predictable rules. The disturbing similarity lies not in legal form but in economic logic.

For several centuries the great maritime powers gradually constructed a system intended to remove

predation from ordinary international commerce because they discovered that secure seas made

almost everybody richer. Piracy became an enemy of all states not simply because pirates were

unpleasant people, but because maritime predation imposed a tax on everyone who depended upon

trade. Freedom of navigation reversed that calculation. Security became cheaper than insecurity, and

commerce expanded accordingly.

Today sanctions, shadow fleets, proxy warfare, naval interdiction and great-power rivalry are beginning

to test whether that calculation still commands universal acceptance. The question is therefore not

whether Vladimir Putin is a pirate, whether Brussels is issuing modern letters of marque or whether the

Houthis are Barbary corsairs reborn. Those comparisons are rhetorically tempting but analytically too

simple. The more disturbing question is what happens when governments once again discover that

making somebody else’s merchant shipping unsafe is an extraordinarily inexpensive way of exercising

power.

The weapon does not have to sink the ship. It merely has to make the ship more expensive to sail.

Once enough states understand that, the global economy begins paying protection money again, not

necessarily in sacks of gold delivered to corsairs off Algiers, but through higher insurance premiums,

longer routes, larger naval budgets, strategic inventories, more expensive freight and ultimately higher

prices for businesses and consumers. We spent centuries building a maritime order in which merchants

did not need to know which warship controlled the horizon before deciding whether to sail.

We should be very careful before assuming that order is permanent.

Elizabeth I would recognise the strategy. What might astonish her is that, after spending four centuries

trying to remove piracy from international commerce, the world’s great powers appear to be

discovering its attractions all over again.