'Piracy' as Legal Construction: How a Word Did Colonial Work

Why this category matters

Across more than three centuries of European, then American, then early-Republican writing on the southern Philippines, one word has done more analytical damage than any other: piracy. It appears in Spanish documents from the 1570s onward, in British naval correspondence on the Sulu Sea from the 18th century, in U.S. military reports of the early 20th, and in Filipino historiography well into the 20th — almost always uncritically. The word looks descriptive. It is in fact categorical, and the category is doing colonial work.

This entry is a companion to The Fort That Could Not Be Held, where the piracy framing first appears in the historical narrative. Here we treat the legal-doctrinal apparatus on its own terms.

What piracy meant under the law of nations

The European law of nations as it consolidated from the 16th century forward — through Gentili, Grotius, Vattel, and the body of state practice — had a precise definition of piracy. A pirate was, in the formula that became standard:

Hostis humani generis — the enemy of all humanity. A person who attacks shipping or coastal targets without the authority of any sovereign, and who is therefore subject to the jurisdiction of any sovereign that captures them, anywhere on the high seas, with summary execution as the lawful disposition.

The definition has three operative elements:

Statelessness. A pirate acts on no sovereign’s authority. They are a private predator.
Universal jurisdiction. Because they act on no sovereign’s authority, no sovereign protects them; any state may prosecute.
Outside the law of war. The protections accorded to combatants in inter-state war — quarter, prisoner status, exchange — do not apply.

This categorical apparatus was not invented for the colonial encounter. It descended from medieval and ancient practice and was sharpened in the 16th–17th centuries to deal with the Mediterranean corsair phenomenon and the trans-Atlantic privateering boom. By the time it arrived in the Philippine archive in the late 16th century, it was a fully developed body of doctrine with well-understood operational consequences.

What Sulu raiders actually were

The Sulu Sultanate was, by the structural test the European doctrine itself applied, a recognized sovereign. It maintained continuous foreign relations with China (from the 13th century), with Brunei, with the Spanish Crown (treaties of 1645, 1646, 1737, 1851 among others), with the British Crown (treaty of 1761), with the Dutch East India Company. It received foreign envoys and dispatched its own. It maintained a dynastic court, a hereditary executive, an established religion, and a treaty-making capacity that European powers themselves recognized in their treaty practice.

Sulu maritime forces operated under the authority of the Sultan or under the authority of allied Iranun, Balangingi, or Maguindanao chiefs whose own status was that of sub-sovereigns within or alongside the Sulu state. By the structural test, they were not stateless. They acted on the authority of recognized sovereign or sub-sovereign principals. They were, in the legal vocabulary that would have been honest, either:

Combatants in inter-polity war (in periods of formal hostility between Sulu and Spain), or
Privateers (in periods of mixed peace, operating under the equivalent of letters of marque from the Sultan or allied chiefs).

In neither case were they pirates in the technical European sense.

Why the misclassification was useful

If Spain had characterized Sulu raiders as combatants or privateers, several legal consequences would have followed. Captured raiders would have been entitled to prisoner-of-war status. Inter-state diplomatic exchange would have been required for prisoner returns. Reprisals against Sulu civilians would have been constrained by the law of war. Spain would have had to acknowledge the Sultanate as a peer sovereign in its operational dealings, which would have created uncomfortable doctrinal pressure on the underlying Spanish claim to sovereignty over the southern archipelago itself.

By characterizing Sulu raiders as pirates, all of these constraints fell away. Captured Tausug, Iranun, and Balangingi combatants could be summarily executed, sold into Spanish penal servitude, or otherwise disposed of without the procedural protections that prisoner-of-war status would have required. Reprisals against Sulu coastal communities could be conducted without legal-doctrinal constraint. The Sultanate could be treated as a den of stateless predators rather than as a sovereign whose territory Spain was unsuccessfully attempting to subjugate.

The misclassification was not a casual error. It was a deliberate legal-rhetorical move that purchased operational advantages Spain could not have obtained under accurate categorization.

Two kinds of evidence the misclassification produces

Once the piracy category is in place, two kinds of distortion enter the documentary record.

First, behavior is described in pirate-coded terms. The seasonal raid, conducted under Sultanate authority for purposes of captive-acquisition for the Canton commodity chain (see the companion entry on the Canton commodity chain), is recorded as “piratical depredation.” The disciplined fleet of lanong and garay under named Iranun and Balangingi commanders is recorded as “pirate hordes.” The structured commodity economy in which captives were a labor input is recorded as “the pirate trade.” None of these descriptions are wrong about the raw events; all of them are wrong about the political character of the events.

Second, structural facts that would falsify the piracy framing are systematically omitted. Spanish, British, and Dutch sources from the 18th–19th centuries rarely note that “pirate” fleets returned to known bases under the authority of named sovereigns; rarely note that captured Spanish prisoners were sometimes returned under Sultan-authorized exchange; rarely note that Sultans negotiated and signed treaties with Spain in the same years their alleged “pirates” were operating. These would be unintelligible behaviors for stateless predators. They are routine behaviors for a sovereign at war.

The American inheritance

The U.S. colonial regime (1898–1946) inherited the Spanish piracy vocabulary and applied it largely without revision. U.S. naval and military reports on operations against Sulu and Maguindanao communities in the 1900s–1910s consistently use “pirate” and “outlaw” terminology to describe what were, structurally, military operations against communities defending sovereign-coded territory.

The U.S. inheritance was reinforced by domestic American legal categories that had no parallel for non-Christian indigenous polities. U.S. federal law had developed a doctrine for treating Native American polities as “domestic dependent nations” (Marshall Court, 1830s) — a category that preserved limited internal sovereignty while denying external. The U.S. did not consistently apply this doctrine to Sulu, Maguindanao, or other Philippine indigenous polities. Where the doctrine would have produced uncomfortable acknowledgment of pre-existing sovereignty, the piracy framing was substituted.

This is visible in the Bud Dajo killings of March 1906 (treated in Story 5). U.S. official communications on the operation describe the Tausug victims as “outlaws” and “pirates.” The actual community at Bud Dajo was an extended-family civilian assembly that had withdrawn to refuse U.S. authority — a recognizable form of sovereign-coded resistance. The piracy/outlawry framing made the legal-doctrinal cost of killing them rhetorically lower than it would have been under accurate categorization.

The Filipino inheritance

The early Republican period (1946 onward) and substantial portions of mid-20th-century Philippine historiography inherited the Spanish-American piracy frame and reproduced it in textbooks, in popular media, and in academic writing. Generations of Filipino students were taught that the southern Philippines had been the source of “Moro piracy” against the central Visayas — a framing that effectively criminalized the resistance of one set of indigenous peoples for the benefit of a national narrative that centered another.

The corrective scholarship — Cesar Adib Majul’s Muslims in the Philippines (1973), James Warren’s The Sulu Zone (1981), the work of Samuel K. Tan, and the Bangsamoro historiography that has developed since the 1970s — has substantially dismantled this framing within academic Philippine history. The popular and educational dismantling has lagged. As recently as the 2010s, Philippine secondary school textbooks were still teaching “Moro piracy” as a uncomplicated descriptive category.

What the dismantling requires

The replacement vocabulary is not difficult to construct. The honest formulations are:

For Sulu fleets operating against Spanish or American forces: the naval forces of the Sultanate of Sulu or, in periods of formal hostility, Sulu combatants in inter-polity war.
For Iranun and Balangingi fleets: the naval forces of the Iranun / Balangingi communities operating under the authority of the Sulu Sultanate or, in some periods, under the authority of their own paramount chiefs.
For raids whose primary purpose was captive-acquisition for the labor needs of the Canton commodity chains: state-organized labor procurement raids of the Sulu Zone economy. This is unflattering language about a brutal economic institution. It is honest. It is also more analytically useful than “piracy,” because it directs attention to the underlying commodity chain rather than to the maritime tactics.
For the Sulu maritime economy in general: the Sulu Zone, in James Warren’s coinage — a structured maritime political-economic system, not a pirate haunt.

None of this language exonerates the Sulu raiding system. The captive economy of the Sulu Zone produced real human suffering on a substantial scale. What the corrected vocabulary does is locate that suffering in its actual structural cause (the labor demands of an integrated commodity economy) rather than in a moralized colonial category that denied the Sultanate’s sovereign status in order to justify Spanish, then American, then Filipino state action against it.

What can honestly be said

Anchored: The European law of nations as developed by the 17th century defined piracy as requiring statelessness; the Sulu Sultanate was a recognized sovereign by the same body of doctrine’s structural test.
Anchored: The Spanish, British, American, and early-Republican use of “pirate” / “piracy” for Sulu maritime activity is categorically incorrect under the law of nations as those same powers applied it elsewhere.
Probable: The misclassification was deliberate, motivated by the operational advantages it conferred on colonial military and administrative action.
Anchored: The misclassification has had documented effects on policy, on military operations including civilian killings, and on educational and historiographical formation through to the present.

Quarantined Claims

Applying the framework laid out in Story 1:

QUARANTINED: That Sulu, Iranun, and Balangingi maritime activity was piracy in any technical legal sense. Under the law of nations as developed and applied by the colonial powers themselves, piracy required statelessness; these forces operated under the authority of recognized sovereigns or sub-sovereigns.
QUARANTINED: That the use of “Moro pirates” in colonial-era and early-Republican-era sources is descriptively neutral. It is categorically loaded language that did and continues to do specific colonial work.
QUARANTINED: That correcting the piracy vocabulary requires excusing or minimizing the captive economy of the Sulu Zone. The captive economy is a separately documentable structural fact whose analysis is not improved by misclassifying the surrounding political institution.
QUARANTINED: That the persistence of the piracy frame in 21st-century popular and educational materials is a politically neutral terminological habit. It is the residue of a specific colonial legal-rhetorical move, and its persistence has identifiable consequences for how Filipinos understand their southern compatriots.

Primary sources: Spanish colonial military and administrative correspondence on the Moro Wars (Blair & Robertson, vols. XXIV–XLI for representative materials); British Foreign Office and Admiralty records on Sulu in the 18th–19th centuries; U.S. War Department and Bureau of Insular Affairs records on the Moro Province operations 1903–1913. Secondary: Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973), foundational rethinking of the Moro Wars vocabulary; James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898 (1981, 2nd ed. 2007); James F. Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity (2002); Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (2009) for the doctrinal history of the piracy category; Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (2010) for the colonial use of legal categories; Samuel K. Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle, 1900–1972 (1977); Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier (2005). Internal cross-references: see “The Fort That Could Not Be Held” for the first appearance of the piracy framing in the Sulu narrative arc, “The Sulu Zone” for the political-economic system the framing concealed, and “The Treaties That Ended a Sovereignty” for the framing’s role in justifying the Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak operations.