Pirate Economics in Robert Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk

Abstract

While Robert Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk (1612) is best known for its treatment of a Christian exile's conversion to Islam, it opens with a nuanced critique of early Jacobean economic policy, one wedged into a debate between captive merchants and famous pirates. Daborne's play makes use of a scene of negotiation, a debate over the impressment of two Frenchmen, not only to destabilize the commercial standards that would have distinguished "merchant-like" dealing from piracy, but also, more importantly, to articulate a shift in English economic thought toward a form of free-market capitalism, as exemplified onstage by the pirates.