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By Root 2055 0

space. A given book might well be authentic in one place, piratical in another. Of course, this made piracy a participant in the development of a system of interacting nation-states: where a city in the Low Countries could reprint French books freelyin the early modern era, the new country of Belgium found itself a pariah for doing the same in the mid-nineteenth century14The practice itself therefore became a vehicle for national, and nationalist, passions. The Irish reprint trade saw itself as a bulwark of that nation against English depredations, and the American reprinters of the nineteenth century married their practices to an entire political economy on this basis. Indeed, the invention of copyright itself was largely a response to a piracy feud overflowing with national resentments, namely the attempt of Scottish reprinters to compete with London's book trade in the first generation when both lived in a "united kingdom." Today we again see these territorial concerns loom large in our own debates about patenting and biopiracy in which they are denounced as forms of"neocolonialism."

Extrapolation from such examples has given us the nearest thing we have to a hypothesis about the development of piracy itself. It sees piracy as essentially a phenomenon of geopolitical thresholds. Piracy's location, on this view, always lies just beyond the sway of the civilizing process. So, for instance, it was reputedly rife in the main thoroughfares of Shakespeare's London, and in the backstreets of Milton's. In the eighteenth century it moved successively to the suburbs, to the provinces, and then to neighboring countries. In the nineteenth its home became America (and Belgium), and in the twentieth it lodged in Japan, followed by China, and now Vietnam. In each case, as it moved further from its original point, laws and norms of intellectual property took hold in the newly un-piratized territories. Piracy emerges, apparently, when developing economic agents live in proximity to great commercial centers. It is therefore identified with the barbarians at the gates, and with what Russians call the "near abroad." It is accordingly destined to be superseded through the civilizing process that leads to a neoclassical, globally integrated economy15

This is all a myth, of course. Piracy has not been superseded in the developed world-indeed, its impact there remains comparable to that in developing nations-and the globe has seen more than one trajectory to more than one way of being modern. Yet the myth matters. The notion of a dissolving frontier between us and them creates real consequences - but consequences that we need to confront, not assume. My hope in devising this history is to suggest ways to do that. In particular, showing that piratical practices have depended on how people understood such things as borders, domestic thresholds, and the nation challenges the axioms on which the geopolitical hypothesis rests. But at the same time it also offers away of comprehending the appeal of that hypothesis itself. What it cannot do-no one book could-is detail what should supplant it in locally specific terms. It would be fascinating to have a detailed account of the Chinese case, for example, or of Japan, Vietnam, or the ex Soviet bloc. I cannot supply these. But I can hope to exemplify an approach that we will need to adopt to create those accounts.

The same goes for attempts to address the current crisis of intellectual property itself. Here, perhaps, is where a historical approach to piracy has its most significant consequences. It tells us that piracy is deeply enmeshed in the world we inhabit-and that the same goes for responses to piracy too. Their history is in a sense the history of modernity itself, viewed not quite from below, but from askance. I hope that readers who make it to the end of this book will come to feel that efforts to combat piracy which do not acknowledge this need to be treated with informed skepticism. Being ill conceived, they are generally ineffective. Worse still, they can neglect some historically constituted