Editing Piracy in the Caribbean (section)

===Golden Age of Piracy, 1660–1726===
{{more citations needed section|date=February 2015}}[[File:Haunts of The Brethren of the Coast (map).jpg|thumb|centre|700px|"Haunts of the 'Brethren of the Coast'", a map of the time reproduced in "Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts" (1897)]]
{{main|Golden Age of Piracy}}

The late 17th and early 18th centuries (particularly between the years 1706 to 1726) are often considered the "Golden Age of Piracy" in the Caribbean, and pirate ports experienced rapid growth in the areas in and surrounding the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Furthermore, during this time period there were approximately 2400 men that were currently active pirates.<ref name="Max 2009">{{cite journal |last=Boot |first=Max |author-link=Max Boot |title=Pirates, Then and Now |journal=Foreign Affairs |volume= 88 |number=4 |year=2009 |pages=94–107}}</ref> The military power of the Spanish Empire in the New World started to decline when King [[Philip IV of Spain]] was succeeded by King [[Charles II of Spain|Charles II]] (r. 1665–1700), who in 1665 became the last [[Habsburg]] king of Spain at the age of four. While Spanish America in the late 17th century had little military protection as Spain entered a phase of [[Decline of Spain|decline as a great power]], it also suffered less from the Spanish Crown's mercantilist policies with its economy. This lack of interference, combined with a surge in output from the silver mines due to increased availability of slave labor (the demand for sugar increased the number of slaves brought to the Caribbean) began a resurgence in the fortunes of Spanish America.

England, France and the Dutch Netherlands had all become [[New World]] colonial powerhouses in their own right by 1660. Worried by the [[Dutch Republic]]'s intense commercial success since the signing of the [[Treaty of Westphalia]], England launched a trade war with the Dutch. The [[English Parliament]] passed the first of its own mercantilist [[Navigation Acts]] (1651) and the Staple Act (1663) that required that English colonial goods be carried only in English ships and legislated limits on trade between the English colonies and foreigners. These laws were aimed at ruining the Dutch merchants whose livelihoods depended on free trade. This trade war would lead to three outright [[Anglo-Dutch Wars]] over the course of the next twenty-five years. Meanwhile, [[King Louis XIV]] of France (r. 1642–1715) had finally assumed his majority with the death of his regent mother Queen Anne of Austria's chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. The "Sun King's" aggressive foreign policy was aimed at expanding France's eastern border with the [[Holy Roman Empire]] and led to constant warfare ([[Franco-Dutch War]] and [[Nine Years' War]]) against shifting alliances that included England, the Dutch Republic, the various German states and Spain. In short, Europe was consumed in the final decades of the 17th century by nearly constant dynastic intrigue and warfare—an opportune time for pirates and [[privateer]]s to engage in their bloody trade.

[[File:Francoislollonais.JPG|thumb|upright|French pirate [[François l'Olonnais]] was nicknamed ''Flail of the Spaniards'' and had a reputation for brutality – offering no quarter to Spanish prisoners.]]
In the Caribbean, this political environment created many new threats for colonial governors. The sugar island of [[Sint Eustatius]] changed ownership ten times between 1664 and 1674 as the English and Dutch dueled for supremacy there. Consumed with the various wars in Europe, the mother countries provided few military reinforcements to their colonies, so the governors of the Caribbean increasingly made use of [[buccaneer]]s as mercenaries and privateers to protect their territories or carry the fight to their country's enemies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these undisciplined and greedy dogs of war often proved difficult for their sponsors to control.

By the late 17th century, the great Spanish towns of the Caribbean had begun to prosper and Spain also began to make a slow, fitful recovery, but remained poorly defended militarily because of Spain's problems and so were sometimes easy prey for pirates and privateers. The English presence continued to expand in the Caribbean as England itself was rising toward great power status in Europe. Captured from Spain in 1655, the island of [[Jamaica]] had been taken over by England and its chief settlement of [[Port Royal]] had become a new English buccaneer haven in the midst of the Spanish Empire. Jamaica was slowly transformed, along with [[Saint Kitts]], into the heart of the English presence in the Caribbean. At the same time the French [[Lesser Antilles]] colonies of [[Guadeloupe]] and [[Martinique]] remained the main centers of French power in the Caribbean, as well as among the richest French possessions because of their increasingly profitable sugar plantations. The French also maintained privateering strongholds around western [[Hispaniola]], at their traditional pirate port of [[Tortuga (Haiti)|Tortuga]], and their Hispaniolan capital of [[Petit-Goâve]]. The French further expanded their settlements on the western half of Hispaniola and founded [[Léogâne]] and [[Port-de-Paix]], even as sugar plantations became the primary industry for the French colonies of the Caribbean.

At the start of the 18th century, Europe remained riven by warfare and constant diplomatic intrigue. France was still the dominant power but now had to contend with a new rival, England ([[Kingdom of Great Britain|Great Britain]] after 1707) which emerged as a great power at sea and land during the [[War of the Spanish Succession]]. But the depredations of the pirates and buccaneers in the Americas in the latter half of the 17th century and of similar mercenaries in Germany during the [[Thirty Years' War]] had taught the rulers and military leaders of Europe that those who fought for profit rather than for King and Country could often ruin the local economy of the region they plundered, in this case the entire Caribbean. At the same time, the constant warfare had led the Great Powers to develop larger standing armies and bigger navies to meet the demands of global colonial warfare. By 1700, the European states had enough troops and ships at their disposal to begin better protecting the important colonies in the [[West Indies]] and in the Americas without relying on the aid of privateers. This spelled the doom of privateering and the easy (and nicely legal) life it provided for the buccaneer. Although Spain remained a weak power for the rest of the colonial period, pirates in large numbers generally disappeared after 1730, chased from the seas by a new British [[Royal Navy]] squadron based at [[Port Royal]], Jamaica and a smaller group of Spanish privateers sailing from the Spanish Main known as the [[Costa Garda]] (Coast Guard in English). With regular military forces now on-station in the West Indies, [[Letter of marque|letters of marque]] were harder and harder to obtain.

Economically, the late 17th century and the early 18th century was a time of growing wealth and trade for all the nations who controlled territory in the Caribbean. Although some piracy would always remain until the mid-18th century, the path to wealth in the Caribbean in the future lay through peaceful trade, the growing of tobacco, rice and sugar and smuggling to avoid the British Navigation Acts and Spanish mercantilist laws. By the 18th century the [[Bahamas]] had become the new colonial frontier for the British. The [[Republic of Pirates]] at the port of Nassau became one of the last pirate havens. A small British colony had even sprung up in former Spanish territory at [[Belize]] in Honduras that had been [[English settling of Belize|founded by an English pirate in 1638]]. The French colonial empire in the Caribbean had not grown substantially by the start of the 18th century. The sugar islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique remained the twin economic capitals of the French Lesser Antilles, and were now equal in population and prosperity to the largest of the English's Caribbean colonies. Tortuga had begun to decline in importance, but France's Hispaniolan settlements were becoming major importers of African slaves as French sugar plantations spread across the western coast of that island, forming the nucleus of the modern nation of [[Haiti]].