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The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates
Shrouded by myth and hidden by Hollywood, the real pirates of the Caribbean come to life in this collection of essays edited by David Head. Twelve scholars of piracy show why pirates thrived in the New World seas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empires, how pirates operated their plundering ventures, how governments battled piracy, and when and why piracy declined. The essays presented take the study of piracy, which can easily lapse into rousing, romanticized stories, to new heights of rigor and insight.
The Golden Age of Piracy also delves into the enduring status of pirates as pop culture icons. Audiences have devoured stories about cutthroats such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan from the time that pirates sailed the sea. By looking at the ideas of gender and sexuality surrounding pirate stories, the fad for hunting pirate treasure, and the construction of pirate myths, the book’s contributors tell a new story about the dangerous men, and a few dangerous women, who terrorized the high seas.
Douglas R. Burgess, Guy Chet, John A. Coakley, Carolyn Eastman, Adam Jortner, Peter T. Leeson, Margarette Lincoln, Virginia W. Lunsford, Kevin P. McDonald, Carla Gardina Pestana, Matthew Taylor Raffety, and David Wilson.
The Golden Age of Piracy also delves into the enduring status of pirates as pop culture icons. Audiences have devoured stories about cutthroats such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan from the time that pirates sailed the sea. By looking at the ideas of gender and sexuality surrounding pirate stories, the fad for hunting pirate treasure, and the construction of pirate myths, the book’s contributors tell a new story about the dangerous men, and a few dangerous women, who terrorized the high seas.
Douglas R. Burgess, Guy Chet, John A. Coakley, Carolyn Eastman, Adam Jortner, Peter T. Leeson, Margarette Lincoln, Virginia W. Lunsford, Kevin P. McDonald, Carla Gardina Pestana, Matthew Taylor Raffety, and David Wilson.
- GenresHistoryPiratesNonfiction
264 pages, Paperback
Published June 15, 2018
39 people are currently reading
248 people want to read
About the author
David Head
9 books11 followersDavid Head is an historian, author, and lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Originally from Western New York, he received his B.A. in history from Niagara University and his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 13, 2022
This is a book with a lot of good facts about pirates. It is also one of the most boring books I have ever read, which given the subject matter is quite the achievement.
December 23, 2018
The scholarly essays in this collection examine both historical pirates and those in popular culture. Although the focus is on piracy in the Caribbean, the time perspective is broader, extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Some analyze how what we have learned from the past can be applied to the present to suppress these marauders today. Others demonstrate how society has viewed pirates at different times and on different levels. Together the essays show how we’ve expanded our understanding of pirates and piracy, as well as future avenues of study to continue the learning process.
This volume is comprised of four sections. It opens with “Pirates and Empire,” which investigates the growth of piracy during the 1500s and 1600s when European nations vied for control of the Caribbean. The second section, “Suppression of Pirates,” discusses piracy’s decline in the region. “Modeling Piracy” pertains to lessons learned and the application of those lessons today. The final section, “Images of Pirates in Their Own Time and Beyond,” scrutinizes how those ashore viewed pirates.
Three essays comprise Section I: Pirates and Empire. In “Why Atlantic Piracy” Carla Gardina Pestana looks at the geographical, economic, and political influences that resulted in the spread of piracy from Europe to the New World. She discusses the importance of understanding what piracy was and was not, and then applying that knowledge to archival records when analyzing accusations against pirates. She also stresses that the inherent violence accompanying piracy ebbed and flowed rather than remaining a constant.
John A. Coakley uses the term private seafarer, instead of privateer or pirate, to discuss the men who played key roles in both the politics of and marauding raids from Jamaica between 1655 and 1692 in “Jamaica’s Private Seafarers: Politics and Violence in a Seventeenth-Century English Colony.” He also examines how these relationships changed over time and the attempts to regulate these expeditions.
Many histories mention pirates and their connections to logwood, but in “‘Sailors from the Woods’: Logwood Cutting and the Spectrum of Piracy” Kevin P. McDonald offers readers a different perspective. Rather than being pirates who harvested the wood that provided much-desired dyes in Europe, they were seamen who sometimes strayed into smuggling or ventured into the more serious crime of piracy.
Section 2: Suppression of Pirates also contains three essays. Douglas R. Burgess leads off with “Trial and Error: Piracy Trials in England and Its Colonies, 1696-1723.” He discusses the evolution of England’s definition of piracy, as well as how American colonists viewed pirates. Initially, these did not coincide, but as time passed piracy changed and so did the latter’s thinking. He shows this by looking at pirate trials over time until the prosecution and punishment of pirates occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.
David Wilson analyzes the effectiveness of this suppression in “Protecting Trade by Suppressing Pirates: British Colonial and Metropolitan Responses to Atlantic Piracy, 1716-1726.” Rather than being a united and coordinated endeavor, he demonstrates that the effectiveness of such efforts was influenced by merchants, agents of colonial governments, and captains in the Royal Navy.
Guy Chet, on the other hand, contradicts the common belief that British efforts to suppress piracy were successful in “The Persistence of Piracy in the British Atlantic.” He provides evidence to show that sea marauding remained a threat long past the end of the “golden age” into the mid nineteenth century.
In the third section of this collection, Modeling Piracy, Virginia W. Lunsford and Peter T. Leeson scrutinize human and piratical behavior of the past in hopes that these lessons can be applied to the problem today. Lunsford’s “A Model of Piracy: The Buccaneers of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” presents a case study that identifies six significant characteristics of piracy that resulted in the dissolution of the buccaneers. Leeson presents a new rationale for looking at pirates in “The Economic Way of Thinking about Pirates.” By examining these rogues through the eyes of an economist, he provides fresh insight into why pirates governed themselves as they did, why they used the black flag, and why they tortured their victims.
Images of Pirates in Their Own Time and Beyond, the final section of this book, looks at pirates through the eyes of those ashore who heard and read of their tales. Margarette Lincoln leads off with “Henry Every and the Creation of the Pirate Myth in Early Modern Britain.” Every’s piratical deeds in the 1690s provided much fodder for literary pens, which allowed audiences of all classes with opportunities to digest issues relevant to them and gave rise to the pirate as a popular hero. By examining these publications, Lincoln shows what they tell us about those who lived when these pirates roamed. She also demonstrates how portrayals of Every changed over time.
In “‘Blood and Lust’: Masculinity and Sexuality in Illustrated Print Portrayals of Early Pirates of the Caribbean,” Carolyn Eastman examines what the descriptions and illustrations in Alexandre Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1678) and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724) showed about the pirates and male readers themselves. (This essay also includes several illustrations from these publications.)
“A Woman Is to Blame: Gender and the Literature of Antebellum Pirate Confessions” is Matthew Taylor Raffety’s contribution. Those caught and punished often cited a woman in their past as the real culprit for their downfall. This female failed to provide the moral fabric necessary to keep the pirates from straying from the straight and narrow. Through an exploration of these confessions, printed in publications prior to the American Civil War, Raffety demonstrates how such portrayals mirrored contemporary morality and the difference between the female and male domains of the middle class during the nineteenth century.
The final essay is Adam Fortner’s “Pirate Ghosts and Buried Treasure: Hunting for Gold in the New American Republic.” He explores how pirates came to be entangled in folklore and what such tales truly tried to teach readers.
David Head, the editor, makes several key points about this collection in his concluding remarks. The contributors have taken sources long available to historians and examine them in new ways. Learning what pirates of yore can tell us is an ongoing process. These scholarly essays add to the existing body of published research to provide “the latest word, not the last word.” (240) Equally important to the factual study of pirates is that context matters and that much can be learned from exploring the cultural history.
The Golden Age of Piracy includes an index, and notes appear at the end of each essay. These provide tidbits about or clarification of statements made, as well as source material where readers can further explore covered topics.
The broader time frame explored in this book is important because there is far more to piracy in the Caribbean than just the early seventeenth century. It’s a common misconception among lay readers that pirates ceased to prey after 1730, yet the opposite is true as some of these scholars ably point out. Although these are scholarly articles, they are written in ways that appeal to all readers. They make us rethink what we think we know about pirates and the world in which they live. The Golden Age of Piracy is an invaluable and insightful addition to any library because it examines pirates through the world in which they lived, rather than through modern-day lenses. In doing so, the scholars skillfully provide important ways in which officials today can address this continuing problem.
This volume is comprised of four sections. It opens with “Pirates and Empire,” which investigates the growth of piracy during the 1500s and 1600s when European nations vied for control of the Caribbean. The second section, “Suppression of Pirates,” discusses piracy’s decline in the region. “Modeling Piracy” pertains to lessons learned and the application of those lessons today. The final section, “Images of Pirates in Their Own Time and Beyond,” scrutinizes how those ashore viewed pirates.
Three essays comprise Section I: Pirates and Empire. In “Why Atlantic Piracy” Carla Gardina Pestana looks at the geographical, economic, and political influences that resulted in the spread of piracy from Europe to the New World. She discusses the importance of understanding what piracy was and was not, and then applying that knowledge to archival records when analyzing accusations against pirates. She also stresses that the inherent violence accompanying piracy ebbed and flowed rather than remaining a constant.
John A. Coakley uses the term private seafarer, instead of privateer or pirate, to discuss the men who played key roles in both the politics of and marauding raids from Jamaica between 1655 and 1692 in “Jamaica’s Private Seafarers: Politics and Violence in a Seventeenth-Century English Colony.” He also examines how these relationships changed over time and the attempts to regulate these expeditions.
Many histories mention pirates and their connections to logwood, but in “‘Sailors from the Woods’: Logwood Cutting and the Spectrum of Piracy” Kevin P. McDonald offers readers a different perspective. Rather than being pirates who harvested the wood that provided much-desired dyes in Europe, they were seamen who sometimes strayed into smuggling or ventured into the more serious crime of piracy.
Section 2: Suppression of Pirates also contains three essays. Douglas R. Burgess leads off with “Trial and Error: Piracy Trials in England and Its Colonies, 1696-1723.” He discusses the evolution of England’s definition of piracy, as well as how American colonists viewed pirates. Initially, these did not coincide, but as time passed piracy changed and so did the latter’s thinking. He shows this by looking at pirate trials over time until the prosecution and punishment of pirates occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.
David Wilson analyzes the effectiveness of this suppression in “Protecting Trade by Suppressing Pirates: British Colonial and Metropolitan Responses to Atlantic Piracy, 1716-1726.” Rather than being a united and coordinated endeavor, he demonstrates that the effectiveness of such efforts was influenced by merchants, agents of colonial governments, and captains in the Royal Navy.
Guy Chet, on the other hand, contradicts the common belief that British efforts to suppress piracy were successful in “The Persistence of Piracy in the British Atlantic.” He provides evidence to show that sea marauding remained a threat long past the end of the “golden age” into the mid nineteenth century.
In the third section of this collection, Modeling Piracy, Virginia W. Lunsford and Peter T. Leeson scrutinize human and piratical behavior of the past in hopes that these lessons can be applied to the problem today. Lunsford’s “A Model of Piracy: The Buccaneers of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” presents a case study that identifies six significant characteristics of piracy that resulted in the dissolution of the buccaneers. Leeson presents a new rationale for looking at pirates in “The Economic Way of Thinking about Pirates.” By examining these rogues through the eyes of an economist, he provides fresh insight into why pirates governed themselves as they did, why they used the black flag, and why they tortured their victims.
Images of Pirates in Their Own Time and Beyond, the final section of this book, looks at pirates through the eyes of those ashore who heard and read of their tales. Margarette Lincoln leads off with “Henry Every and the Creation of the Pirate Myth in Early Modern Britain.” Every’s piratical deeds in the 1690s provided much fodder for literary pens, which allowed audiences of all classes with opportunities to digest issues relevant to them and gave rise to the pirate as a popular hero. By examining these publications, Lincoln shows what they tell us about those who lived when these pirates roamed. She also demonstrates how portrayals of Every changed over time.
In “‘Blood and Lust’: Masculinity and Sexuality in Illustrated Print Portrayals of Early Pirates of the Caribbean,” Carolyn Eastman examines what the descriptions and illustrations in Alexandre Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1678) and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724) showed about the pirates and male readers themselves. (This essay also includes several illustrations from these publications.)
“A Woman Is to Blame: Gender and the Literature of Antebellum Pirate Confessions” is Matthew Taylor Raffety’s contribution. Those caught and punished often cited a woman in their past as the real culprit for their downfall. This female failed to provide the moral fabric necessary to keep the pirates from straying from the straight and narrow. Through an exploration of these confessions, printed in publications prior to the American Civil War, Raffety demonstrates how such portrayals mirrored contemporary morality and the difference between the female and male domains of the middle class during the nineteenth century.
The final essay is Adam Fortner’s “Pirate Ghosts and Buried Treasure: Hunting for Gold in the New American Republic.” He explores how pirates came to be entangled in folklore and what such tales truly tried to teach readers.
David Head, the editor, makes several key points about this collection in his concluding remarks. The contributors have taken sources long available to historians and examine them in new ways. Learning what pirates of yore can tell us is an ongoing process. These scholarly essays add to the existing body of published research to provide “the latest word, not the last word.” (240) Equally important to the factual study of pirates is that context matters and that much can be learned from exploring the cultural history.
The Golden Age of Piracy includes an index, and notes appear at the end of each essay. These provide tidbits about or clarification of statements made, as well as source material where readers can further explore covered topics.
The broader time frame explored in this book is important because there is far more to piracy in the Caribbean than just the early seventeenth century. It’s a common misconception among lay readers that pirates ceased to prey after 1730, yet the opposite is true as some of these scholars ably point out. Although these are scholarly articles, they are written in ways that appeal to all readers. They make us rethink what we think we know about pirates and the world in which they live. The Golden Age of Piracy is an invaluable and insightful addition to any library because it examines pirates through the world in which they lived, rather than through modern-day lenses. In doing so, the scholars skillfully provide important ways in which officials today can address this continuing problem.
March 2, 2022
5/10 A collection of essays about Caribbean and Atlantic piracy between the 16th and 18th century. The book is broken into 4 sections. The first deals with the political and economic forces that drove piracy in early European contest of the Caribbean. The second discusses how when those forces ended, pirates went from supported to suppressed. The third analyzes what we can learn from 16th century buccaneers and apply to modern piracy. And finally the last section examines how cultural views of pirates have evolved over time.
Your enjoyment of the book will depend on your interest in these topics and your expectations. If you are expecting swashbuckling recounts of famous pirates like Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, or Blackbeard, you will not find it here. Instead look to The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward. An excellently researched yet still entertaining account of the most famous pirates and their true (and legendary) exploits. This book is firmly a scholarly work. Like most scholarly work the writers tend to overstate their case, which is to be expected since they are writing for rigorous conditions. You can usually get the gist of the argument by reading the introduction and conclusion, which this is something I did when the body of evidence to support their thesis became too tedious for casual enjoyment.
I'm more into in pirate history than most people so I found the book mildly interesting (thankfully I got the book on sale for $2 so I wasn't too miffed). But this isn't something I would recommend to someone unless you've already read some of the more engaging pirate history books and are wanting to dive deeper. Which, if you're the type of person to seek this book out then you probably are.
Your enjoyment of the book will depend on your interest in these topics and your expectations. If you are expecting swashbuckling recounts of famous pirates like Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, or Blackbeard, you will not find it here. Instead look to The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward. An excellently researched yet still entertaining account of the most famous pirates and their true (and legendary) exploits. This book is firmly a scholarly work. Like most scholarly work the writers tend to overstate their case, which is to be expected since they are writing for rigorous conditions. You can usually get the gist of the argument by reading the introduction and conclusion, which this is something I did when the body of evidence to support their thesis became too tedious for casual enjoyment.
I'm more into in pirate history than most people so I found the book mildly interesting (thankfully I got the book on sale for $2 so I wasn't too miffed). But this isn't something I would recommend to someone unless you've already read some of the more engaging pirate history books and are wanting to dive deeper. Which, if you're the type of person to seek this book out then you probably are.
January 28, 2022
“The Golden Age of Piracy” nos muestra a los verdaderos Piratas del Caribe, personajes históricos que hoy en día se tienen muy presentes en la cultura popular.
El libro es un recuento de doce diferentes ensayos escritos por dice diferentes autores; cada uno de ellos explicando la historia de los piratas desde una época, enfoque y punto de vista diferente. De esta forma, se aseguran de que el lector entienda y conozca todo lo necesario sin dejar mucho a la deriva.
Sin embargo, el echo de que sean doce autores independientes uno del otro dio lugar a discrepancias entre los autores, contradiciéndose unos a otros en algunos pocos casos.
Aún con este detalle, definitivamente el libro es recomendable para cualquier persona con poco conocimiento acerca de los piratas o con única referencia de ellos a lo visto en las películas y series de hoy en día.
El libro es un recuento de doce diferentes ensayos escritos por dice diferentes autores; cada uno de ellos explicando la historia de los piratas desde una época, enfoque y punto de vista diferente. De esta forma, se aseguran de que el lector entienda y conozca todo lo necesario sin dejar mucho a la deriva.
Sin embargo, el echo de que sean doce autores independientes uno del otro dio lugar a discrepancias entre los autores, contradiciéndose unos a otros en algunos pocos casos.
Aún con este detalle, definitivamente el libro es recomendable para cualquier persona con poco conocimiento acerca de los piratas o con única referencia de ellos a lo visto en las películas y series de hoy en día.
April 11, 2021
Solid collection, but not great as a first book on the topic; read some Cordingly or Konstam first and then come here to read some great scholarly discussion "between the lines" of the conventional histories.
September 9, 2024
I already knew many of these things but I also learned a lot. pirates are so damn interesting
May 8, 2025
Each essay is written by a different author. The book is very informative, but also a little dry. I found myself really having to concentrate. Most essays were only about 10-12 pages long, but they were so densely packed with information that reading one essay per day was enough. I did learn a lot about the pirate culture.
May 10, 2020
Honestly I would have liked this 3 or so years ago when I was writing my essay on the myth and reality of the portrayal of Pirates.
Some essays were better than others but honestly I learned quite a bit on areas I didn't know much about or nothing about at all. Like I didn't know about the illegal logwood trade but somehow I found it interesting?
For the most part there isn't sole focus on particular characters other than perhaps Henry Every and one essay which has a pretty big focus on Henry Morgan. I'm surprised there wasn't more writing on Woodes Rogers but I'll let that slide.
Honestly I an very glad I got back into my history swing again. This was very enjoyable to those with a historical mind or who have a training in history.
Some essays were better than others but honestly I learned quite a bit on areas I didn't know much about or nothing about at all. Like I didn't know about the illegal logwood trade but somehow I found it interesting?
For the most part there isn't sole focus on particular characters other than perhaps Henry Every and one essay which has a pretty big focus on Henry Morgan. I'm surprised there wasn't more writing on Woodes Rogers but I'll let that slide.
Honestly I an very glad I got back into my history swing again. This was very enjoyable to those with a historical mind or who have a training in history.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews