Pirates, it is frequently claimed, have existed since the dawn of history, as long as there has been traffic and commerce at sea. Presumably, the origins of piracy would thus be sometime in the pre-historic past, when people first took to the sea for commercial purposes, probably around eight thousand years ago, along the coast of the Persian Gulf. Historical records over close to three and half millennia, from ancient Egypt to the present, seem to provide documentation of piratical activity from all around the world. Piracy would appear to be ubiquitous across a very longue durée in the history of humanity, and only with the projection of sea power by major states and empires, whether ancient (when Rome or Srivijaya controlled their adjacent seas) or modern (when Great Britain or the United States did so) was piracy efficiently suppressed, at least temporarily.

On closer examination, however, this grand narrative has several weaknesses. As for the allegedly pre-historic origins of piracy, it is not an activity that has left distinct traces in archaeological records − unlike, for example, farming, hunting, or fishing. It may be inferred from material remains and ancient depictions that maritime violence occurred. In the absence of written sources, however, it is generally not possible to determine whether such violence was piratical by modern definitions, or by those current at the time. As Philip de Souza put it, a history of piracy can “be written only on the basis of texts which mention pirates or piracy in explicit terms, or which can be shown to refer implicitly to pirates or piracy, according to the normal usage of these terms in the culture which produced the texts.”

The alleged opposition between piracy and state power is often also much less straightforward than it may seem. Maritime raiding and violence were regularly central to the accumulation of power, wealth, and state building, whether we look to ancient Greece, medieval Scandinavia, Elizabethan England, pre-colonial Southeast Asia, or the Chinese coasts in late imperial times. As the capacity to project sea power and exercise maritime violence became institutionalized and linked to state building the need to draw a border between licit and illicit violence arose. From this perspective, the concept of piracy understood by definition as illicit violence, applies only in relation to a state or system of states (whether real or imagined).