Thompson, Rediker fashions his social and cultural histories from below, with special thematic emphasis placed upon work, class, and power. In the admirable tradition of the late E.
In this fine collection of essays, Professor Rediker has provided a welcome addition to the growing subfield of pirate studies and created a worthy companion volume to his landmark maritime labor history, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. This socioeconomic aspect of piracy was de rigueur until the peak of the golden age of piracy, roughly 1716 to 1726, the decade explored under the revealing historical lens of Marcus Rediker. Regulating and enforcing this tenuous authority was a herculean task, however, and pirates from all regions demonstrated over time that they were indeed not enemies of all humankind instead, they nearly always found friendly ports of call in which to trade their looted cargoes, spend their equitably divided shares, and debauch themselves in drunken orgies.
As these latter-day maritime empires expanded beyond their familiar home waters, their desire to control the seas and the jurisdictional claims of sovereignty followed in the wakes of their carracks, caravels, fly-boats, and frigates. This legal designation, notably absent in the Hellenic era, was re-invoked two millennia later by the courts of the early modern mercantile empires for similar imperial objectives.
Pirates plundered periodically throughout the ancient Aegean, but it was Roman jurisprudence that first characterized the watery brigands as hostes humani generis, enemies of all mankind, in a bid to protect a claim of imperial sovereignty upon the seas that linked their cross-continental empire. Accounts of pirates and piracy, ranging from the fantastical to the historical and everywhere in between, have been recorded since antiquity, when trading vessels were first constructed to move people and goods via waterways.
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