This paper explores how maritime networks of violence, mostly consisting of Greek-speaking corsairs, interacted with the inter-imperial legal system between 1770 and 1830. Beginning during the 1768-1774 Russo-Ottoman War, the Russian government sponsored a mixture of Maltese, Ottoman Ragusan, Ottoman Greek, Venetian Greek, and British corsairs to raid Ottoman shipping. Over the next 60 years, these corsairs attacked Ottoman, British, French, and even Russian merchant shipping. Sometimes they flew the flag of Russia; sometimes, that of France; in the 1820s, that of the newly-declared Greek nation-state; and sometimes, no flag at all. These raiders—variously called privateers and pirates—have been previously seen as examples of proto-nationalist Greek resistance to Ottoman rule. But, taking seriously their multi-lingual origins and their complex motivations, this paper conceptualizes them as maritime, trans-regional “networks of violence.” The paper then uses Ottoman and British archival sources to trace how these networks negotiated with and shaped the inter-imperial legal regime of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As these corsairs of varying origins, and loyalties, seized ships, cargoes, and crews, and were themselves captured, the Ottomans and their counterparts were forced to confront three important sets of questions. First, what rights did states have, in controlling their subjects’ extraterritorial violence, in searching suspect ships, and in seizing enemy and neutral cargo? Second, who, as a legitimate sovereign state, could exercise these rights, in licensing privateers? And finally, who had the right to decide—which states’ prize courts were legitimate, and which were not? These debates grew out of the Aegean and Black Sea context but paralleled similar questions which were asked in the Atlantic World at the same time--questions which fueled litigation in U.S. federal courts, helped spark the War of 1812, shaped the international law of neutrality, and eventually produced the 1856 Paris Declaration on maritime law. Engaging with a wealth of recent legal and historical scholarship on this Atlantic context, the paper then reflects on larger questions of imperial sovereignty and trans-regional, inter-imperial law, situating the Ottoman case in a global context.