The Pirate Wars

by Peter Earle

Investigating the fascination pirates hold over the popular imagination, Peter Earle takes the fable of ocean-going Robin Hoods sailing under the "banner of King Death" and contrasts it with the murderous reality of robbery, torture and death and the freedom of a short, violent life on the high seas.

The Pirate Wars charts 250 years of piracy, from Cornwall to the Caribbean, from the 16th century to the hanging of the last pirate captain in Boston in 1835. Along the way, we meet characters like Captain Thomas Cocklyn, chosen as commander of his ship "on account of his brutality and ignorance," and Edward Teach, the notorious "Blackbeard," who felt of his crew "that if he did not now and then kill one of them they would forget who he was." Using material from British Admiralty records, this is an account of the Golden Age of pirates and of the men of the legitimate navies of the world charged with the task of finally bringing these cutthroats to justice.

Genres: History, Pirates, Nonfiction, Historical, Adventure, World History, Nautical

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Peter Earle formerly taught at the London School of Economics and is now Emeritus Reader in Economic History at the University of London.

Reviews

[Terry Cornell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast well-researched read that covers the pirate wars in the late 1500's through most of their eradication through the early 18oo's. From early piracy off the coast of Ireland and Britain, to Mediterranean piracy from the ports of Tunis, Tripoli, Sale, Algiers and Malta. Later the Red Sea pirates in Asia and piracy in the Caribbean. Of course pirate hunting of various navies go along with pirates! My previous reading has been mainly about Caribbean and American coastal piracy, so this book provided a nice overview. A few maps would've been useful, and the first chapter on the mythology of the pirate in media was a little disappointing. A good introductory book on the subject though.

[Melissa McShane · Rating 4 out of 5]

More scholarly than Cordingly's Under the Black Flag but drawing on many of the same sources, I found this slightly less readable but every bit as informative. Earle is more sanguine about the possibility of black men being equals in pirate crews rather than property (Cordingly's argument is pretty persuasive) but he does an excellent job of comparing the myth to the reality, and I like his organization, both chronological and topical. He also makes no secret of his love of the British Navy and his wish that people would stop romanticizing pirates, but surprisingly is able to maintain a degree of impartiality, particularly when he criticizes the Royal Navy for being so slow to adopt appropriate tactics in their fight against the pirates.

More interesting is that he extends the study of pirates in the Caribbean past the place most writers end, in about 1725, and writes about the resurgence of piracy in the early 1800s. The last pirate captain was hanged in the 1820s--I'd seen this fact in several places--which suggested that pirates must have been active until that time, and Earle writes about that very short (I think about eight years) period. Very interesting addition to my reading. This probably isn't the best choice for casual reading, but as research material it's pretty good.

[Amy]

8 years later and I still can't get into this one. I think I admit defeat. Interesting premise but meandering writing

.........

This book smells weird. Like, really weird. Probably won't finish it because every time I pick it up, I'm distracted by the weird *smell*

[Meekachii · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 40 pages… I don’t know how pirates can possibly be boring but my goodness I was bored. It was well written, but definitely not for me.

[Phillip Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more research material and information than an entertaining history of piracy. Peter Earle enumerates the many tactics used by the pirates throughout the history of pirates up the the 19th century. The author makes it known that the Hollywood and fictional pirates are as far removed from reality as fairy tales are from the historical Middle Ages.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book explains piracy's history. Originally, the Christian pirates of Malta and the Muslim pirates of Barbary conducted a sort of religious warfare. They attacked shipping and settlements and sold members of the other side's faith into slavery. Spain's riches caused a sort of piracy condoned by other European governments, including England. After Spain fought some wars with other European countries, this form of state-sponsored piracy mainly died off. During major European Wars, each side would hire sailors from other countries to fight for their side. When wars would end, these privateers would be out of a job, so there tended to be a big influx of piracy following naval wars. A combined British and American fleet destroyed the nasty Cuban pirates in the 1820's. British, French, Dutch, and Russian ships destroyed the Greece-based pirates shortly afterwards. Thus, piracy as we know it has mainly ended. According to the news, it has kind of survived off of places like Somalia.
Although this book gives a decent overview of piracy, it never really allows you to get to know a pirate or group of pirates. It focuses more on anti-piracy campaigns waged by governments, and thus it isn't the most exciting read.

[Rick Brindle · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that tells you almost as much as you'd ever need to know about pirates. Immensely readable, in fact I read it twice on the same holiday. Peter Earle educates the reader in a very easy way, making the topic vastly entertaining and accessible. By no means sympathetic to the pirates of history, he tells it like it is, portraying them as ruthless murderers who obeyed no laws. And yet, the fascination about them remains. As well as their thoroughly dastardly side, we are also told about how they were more democratic than most nations, and maybe for that reason they were hounded to destruction. All sides of the argument are given, leaving the readers to make up their own mind.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend this book for anyone who has a deep or passing interest in pirates or the history of piracy. This book details the history of piracy in the western hemisphere, from the beginnings in the 1500's all the way until it was more or less wiped out in the mid 1800's. There are quite a few details that may come as a surprise to those who read it, the stories of the hoards of treasure that pirates were said to possess do indeed have some truth in them. The richest of the pirates were the "Red Sea Men" as it lists some of the treasure hauls they had made...

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Peter Earle's work to be informative and very entertaining. He makes his arguments in an unpretentious, frank, clear, and concise manner. Additionally, the book is the perfect length as to make sure the reader won't lose interest. Frankly, I was a bit disheartened to read the vociferously negative reviews that lambasted the book as dry and boring. No, it's not some romantic grade school level tale of piracy on the high seas; however, as an academic piece, I can emphatically say that it is highly informative, and more importantly, quite entertaining!!

[Steve Yetter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars for thoroughness. As others have noted, stylistically it’s a bit of a slog.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has to be admitted that even I am susceptible to pirate charm and romance. [...] Nevertheless, I was brought up to admire the navy and my instincts are on the side of law and order, so that the navy rather than the pirates has my support. (xii)

A classic conservative history of piracy, and one that has the unusual distinction of being one of the only volumes to actually tell the story of Anglo-European piracy chronologically, rather than thematically. The conceit of the book is that most histories of piracy are mistaken in looking too closely at the Golden Age - Earle instead sees a larger continuity of the nascent British Empire engaging in a growing series of escalating "wars" against piracy, first at home on the shores of the British Isles in the Elizabethan Age, then further abroad, culminating not in the 1720s (as most historians declare) but in the 1830s instead. Although piracy had lulls, it kept rearing its head until the British navy had perfected its technological and logistical control of the oceans, with the subsequent decline of global empires (Earle fears) raising the possibility of pirates returning.

In the process, Earle sets himself up as a counterpart to the Marxist pirateology of Marcus Rediker, against which he has what might be termed strong opinions, though he mostly keeps things civil. As a matter of fact, despite exhibiting a weary annoyance at the rise of queer, feminist, and postcolonial pirate scholarship, Earle is actually very good at taking their insights onboard and incorporating that research into his narrative in a pretty even-handed way, sceptical of the more radical claims, attentive to the ambiguities, and suitably revisionist where their evidence is strongest. Earle is particularly good at emphasising the evolution of pirate cultures over time, noting the continuities and the changes in political attitudes, social structures, and levels of violence over the centuries. Even so, one can't help noticing him gritting his teeth with quips about how, when those scholars romanticise piracy, "It sounds such a desirable life that it seems a shame that there were not more women to enjoy it and so join the blacks and gays who challenged the myth of the white, male, heterosexual terror of the seas." (6)

Lest you think Earle be too gung-ho in his militarism, however, (and make no mistake, he absolutely is gung-ho, and highly peeved at the 'heroic' navy being overshadowed by the romanticised image of pirates in pop-culture), Earle also tries to unpick the story of what he calls "Piratical imperialism" - the process by which the British empire employed privateers/pirates to its own ends before turning on them once they had served their purpose and began to obstruct the further development of capitalism. Though he explicitly puts himself on the side of law and order, he isn't shy about the violence, terror, and slavery this state-building project entailed, and I'll admit that I have to respect that forthright consistency.

Nevertheless, for my money, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns made that argument more coherently than Earle does, which mostly comes down to the fact that Earle is not very good at telling stories. His narrative voice attempts a kind of gentleman wryness that you tend to get in a lot of pro-imperial military histories, but quite frankly he isn't charming enough to pull it off, and it tends to muddle his arguments in a way that a more strictly academic prose style would have avoided. The most obvious, and somewhat creepy, example of this appears in his descriptions of sexual assaults committed by pirate crews. If his narrative happens in the middle of describing the military suppression of pirates then he will write about this horror in frank, explicit language, but there are other moments where Earle gets carried away with affectionately cajoling pirate culture for its foibles, and if sexual assault occurs in these sections then he tends to elide it with weird euphemisms like "Sometimes this sort of thing could get out of hand" (180), which plays at a coyness quite out of keeping with how seriously he treats pirate atrocities elsewhere.

So he's no David Cordingly on that front, but he's better than Cordingly at dealing with the mercuriality of his sources, making it explicit which sources he gives more weight and why at any given point, and remaining open to ambiguity where he cannot justify a bold claim or dismissal of a certain narrative. One of the reasons this volume is cited so much is that Earle actually uncovered a whole set of new sources in the archives of the British Admiralty, which offers a wealth of insight into how British officials perceived (or failed to perceive) the problems of piracy and the difficulties the imperial administration faced in trying to suppress it.

For some godforsaken reason though, this book doesn't have any maps, which means that the necessarily global scale of this narrative can get a bit confused, especially since Earle rarely zooms out to examine the structural factors at play. It's notable, for instance, that recent pirate histories (e.g. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740) have criticised Earle for his blind spots in adhering too closely to the story as the British state perceived it - i.e. as a battle against individualist marauders on the high seas bringing booty into ports by corrupting local officials. More recent scholarship instead emphasises the land-based communities that pirates were a part of, relied on, and were supported by, and so where Earle sees the decline of piracy as being due to the brave lads of the royal navy individually hunting down and killing pirates, more recent scholars have emphasised the structural factors of economic and political shifts in the region that led to land-communities decreasing their support for the pirate raiders roaming ever closer to their shores. This latter narrative seems more convincing to me, but Earle's thesis is still useful for highlighting the specific technological, administrative, and logistical reforms progressively made by the British navy in its efforts to build a more robust system of maritime surveillance and suppression.

A useful book then, and one that tries more seriously than most to handle the ambiguous qualities of pirate politics on both sides of the conflict responsibly. It's just a shame it's not as clear or coherent as it could have been, and that Earle isn't the stylist he quite clearly wishes he was. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that he can't get himself to truly hate pirates and their swaggering braggadocio as much as he thinks he should.

[Wayne Jordaan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative read on piracy, mostly affecting and perpetuated by Westerners. So now I know that Jack Sparrow and Treasure Island were just imaginative fictionalisations of a brutal criminal lifestyle adopted by mostly lower classes, some motivated by greed, the majority driven to it by the brutal criminal lifestyles of those who lorded it over them. A society of criminals where captains were appointed by popular vote, and members of the gang signed articles governing their existence. Aha, that explains those black-skinned raconteurs with the earring, bandanna and cutlass? Think again, after all, we are dealing with a time in which a sought-after commodity in the new colonies was slaves to toil in the sugar plantations. So, in spite of quite an egalitarian outlook among pirates in terms of decision-making and loot-sharing, Kunta Kinte in the raided slaver was not liberated, but rather a a newly acquired good to auction off in the slave market. And to my grade 6 teacher, Francis Drake was not a hero, but an armed robber, who enjoyed the protection of powerful interests. If you like your myths exploded, this is the book for you.

[Dimitrios Mistriotis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is one of those books for which both the comments against it are right **and** those in favor of it are right as well. Very informative, author tried to be objective, liked the approach of not trying to romanticize piracy nor the pirates themselves, but also very dry and hard to read. It is one of those books that you start reading with vigor and then you just cannot bear any more (read in a review that a person started and dropped it three times, when read seemed an exaggeration, now makes perfect sense). For me that point was after the middle of the book. I just wanted to finish it so it was the only book I took with me while using the bus/tube.

How/why I piked it up: This is funny: it was dropped in a "take me" area in a local café chain (Nero/UK), where I then being a good patron dropped another one the next day being a good patron. Else I would never knew its existence.

[Amy]

Couldn't get into this one: he starts off complaining that while we used to think of pirates as being straight white men, quote, "this will no longer do in our politically-correct, post imperial world," and in the next paragraph both seems to agree that a large fraction of pirates were black while also mocking other historians for suggesting it ("all pirates must be black and gay.")

He then proceeds to complain about The Feminists insisting that historians come up with more women pirates and lamenting "the little girls of today demand(ing) to be the heiresses of Mary Read and Anne Bonny." (Because pirates were Criminals and thus should not be in children's books. I can only assume that he has a forthcoming book complaining about Bonnie and Clyde movies.)

Not rated because maybe it gets better later.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel the need to clarify that there was nothing truly bad about the book. But there was nothing truly enjoyable about it either. While the accounts of piracy are written in an easy to understand way that doesn't glorify brutality and stealing, I found the explanations for the rise of piracy to be unsatisfactory. I confess I'm a bit of a Marxist where piratical history is concerned, and I disagreed with the author's interpretation of why piracy came about. As other reviewers have mentioned, it reads like a work produces by a history scholar. Not even other history scholars tend to enjoy reading these--and yet so many of us complain about "popular" historians (so named for their sensationalism and clarity, not necessarily because they are famous).

[Mark Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an academic treatment of piracy rife with footnotes of clarifications, extended extractions and citations from first-hand source materials such as Johnson's 1726 history of piracy, British Admiralty records and letters, and Esquelmeling's account of Morgan in the mid 17th century.

If you're looking for a good academic introduction to the subject this the place to start. It's readable enough for someone with a passing interest in piracy, but some of the other recent books about piracy, including Empire of the Blue Waves makes for a more interesting read for the more casual student of historical piracy.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Pirate Wars" by Peter Earle starts with the first pirates recorded and follows along time and geographical setting explaining differences and happenings. The resource amount and usage in the book is excellent, with letters and journals quoted from pirates or navy soldiers to clarify the author's stories. The diversity of pirates mentioned makes the book more interesting and exotic. The organization of the book can sometimes be unclear, where areas of geographical setting can change immensly within one chapter. The book can also drag on at times, making some information pointless as regards to the overall topic of the book.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pirate Wars covers piracy from the early 17th century through the mid-19th century. This is a wider scope than most books on piracy, which tend to only cover the "Golden Age" of piracy from around 1715 to 1725, and this broader view on the subject is a breath of fresh air. Earle's style is smooth and flows nicely from chapter to chapter, but he hits a couple of bad notes early on when he mocks recent trends in other pirate studies. It's probably best to ignore these points of irritable tone and move on; the entire book is not like that.

[Scott D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superior. Earle covers all the aspects or piracy, including much that is ignored by the authors of other books on pirates. He also takes the perspective of the nations afflicted by the problem and illuminates how they dealt with it. There's plenty here to feast upon if you're into the pirate genre, including buccaneers, privateers, corsairs, and pirates of various nationalities in various theaters of operation, well before and after the so-called "golden age". If I had only one book to study the general topic of pirates, this would be it.

[Peter Kyhn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The real pirates of history were not the wags of the modern mega movie. Drunken rage, pillage, torture, and mass murder was the reality - not Disney’s Jack Sparrow. Privacy was the scourge of the coastal waters and the high seas.
British author Peter Earle gives the reader a heaping serving of reality, taken from 17th and 18th century newspaper reports and more incisively from the annuls of the British Admiralty.
The writing is non concise and pedantic, but my interest in the topic kept me plugging along.
At 250 pages, it’s a good weekend read.

[Ben Dial · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the history in the book, and I did learn quite a bit from it. It has probably the best historical reasoning for how piracy grew to its peak in the early 18th century than any other book I have read on the subject. Unfortunately, it reads a bit like a history book. The adventure and danger of piracy and those who hunted them was lost in the detail of dates, names, places and overall dry writing style.

[David R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the perspective: that pirates were a scourage worthy of being extirpated from the high seas. And Earle does a fine job documentating that process with special emphasis on the 17th and 18th centuries. But it is a bit too dry. Still, we need to see more of these efforts to de-glamorize murderers and robbers.

[David Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice overview of the piratical era with some great bits of bet-you-didn't-know-this info but having read White Gold by Giles Milton which tackles similar territory, this one comes off somewhat dry.

[Bap · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a monumental achievement. It is a stunning that anyone can write about 250 years of Pirates with all the vitality and fun drained out of it. Blackbeard and his ilk must be spinning in their graves. It is enough to want to go to an all you can eat seafood place. Arrrr me maties.

[Paul Pensom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Informative but terribly dry. Guilty I think of trying to fit too much into one book, when putting some flesh on to the bones of just a couple of these fascinating monsters would have been a more interesting route. Blackbeard alone is surely worthy of his own history.

[Andre Gedeon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing history lesson.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was packed with information, but was not that interesting. It reads a lot more like an academic study then something that was written for entertainment. There are better books on pirates.

[Frank Taranto · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overview of the history of Pirates in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediteranean Sea. Tells the story of both the pirates and the navies that hunted them.

[Jennifer Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to contain a lot of interesting information about piracy, but it had no life. There was the rare flash, but that's all.

[Jason Mather · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nonfiction book that feels like a novel. A real page-turner, with lessons for today’s world.