Maritime plundering, or piracy, has happened in nearly all regions of the world, in most ages of human history. Yet the image that we have of "a pirate" in our collective imagination comes from one period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So "why has that one relatively short moment come to stand for all sea raiding across time and space?"
That is the question with which Richard Blakemore begins his new book Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy. To answer it he not only surveys decades of plundering and combat at sea and on land, but also interprets court cases, parliamentary legislation, imperial administration or the lack of it, and the slave trade. For the “golden age of piracy”, like a conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, at times seems to be connected to pretty much everything else going on at the same time. Except that in the case of piracy from 1650 to 1722, it actually was.
Richard Blakemore is Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading. Enemies of All is his second book.
For Further Investigation
We've talked about pirates of the "golden age" with Steve Hahn in Episode 87; and they came up again in, of all places, in the history told by trees in Episode 156
Probably the previous single best book about pirates in the "golden age", both factual and fictional, was David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (Random House, 1995)
Marcus Rediker provides a view of pirates as proto-Bolsheviks in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age; Peter T. Leeson describes them as highly rational market actors in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
And for more on one of the most curious episodes we talked about, see Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates–a great book
There are a lot of bad editions of Charles Johnson, General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, but this is the best one until we can convince Richard Blakemore to produce an edited and annotated version.
