Villains of All Nations by Marcus Rediker

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. McDonald (Department of History, University of California Santa Cruz)Īccounts 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.

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age.

Villains of All Nations by Marcus Rediker