Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

Abstract

Piracy, according to this author, was more about liberty, brotherhood, and equality than robbery, violence, and murder. Indeed, in Marcus Rediker's eyes, pirates were almost early modern democratic socialists. Their opponents were the ones who made them engage in robbery, violence, and murder. Piracy was also very narrowly focused about the 1710s and 1720s and the generation of infamous, seafaring thieves that underlies all modern, romanticized images of pirates. The author's own image of them is more romantic than he thinks, but he still knows a great deal about pirates and has many interesting, useful, and insightful things to say about them. The author, who professes history at the University of Pittsburgh, has been writing and publishing books about sailors, including pirates, for at least a quarter of a century. In this, his latest book, he has arranged his material in eight brief chapters of roughly equal length in order to present a social and cultural history of pirates at the end of several centuries of development; by the early eighteenth century, he argues, piracy had evolved into a dialectic of terror between poor, working-class sailors and the early modern capitalist state. After setting his argument out in the first chapter, in the next four chapters he presents some interesting facts and figures about who became pirates, the social organization of their ships and activities, and their social relations with each other and with their enemies. Some of this has appeared in earlier studies. Rediker is adamant that pirates were poor working seamen recruited largely through mutiny and by volunteers from captured merchantmen. He pays little attention to coerced recruits and makes no mention of others such as poor white colonists from West Indian colonies, the economic detritus of plantation economies, who fled their oppression ashore. Pirates' ship organization was intended to achieve control of their working conditions, and their banditry was a cry for justice. Far from preying upon one another, pirates had a profound sense of community and brotherhood. The final three chapters deal with special topics; women pirates are located within the context of working-class culture, and pirates became demonized only when their enemies began to extirpate them. Finally, out of an exploration of the interrelated themes of death, apocalypse, hell, and self-destruction, Rediker sees piracy fundamentally as a struggle for life against socially organized death. His pirates are collectivist, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian folk heroes with enlightened views on liberty, transvestites, and slaves. Unfortunately, for a book entitled Villains of All Nations, the evidence and argument are almost exclusively anglocentric, and, while the behavior of these early eighteenth-century pirates underlies their modern image, the author is insufficiently skeptical of the romanticism in his own sources. That said, he has written an analytical, well-crafted book with a tightly focused argument containing some solid facts.