Written by Tiffany Miron, September of 2024
A Brief Overview
The Golden Age of Piracy is a collection of essays organized and edited by David Head to pull together the ideas of several scholars and recent research on Golden Age Piracy. The essays Head included are organized into four sections: “Pirates and Empire”, “Suppression of Pirates”, “Modeling Piracy”, and “Images of Pirates in their Own Time and Beyond.” These four sections set up a sort of timeline for the different scholars' work to follow, starting with the beginnings of piracy in the Atlantic world and the spectrum of those who were pirates. Overall, this book uses recent scholarship to tell how piracy became a factor in the Atlantic and how despite piracy being more controlled by the nations in the 1720’s, piracy in media and legend are still at large within our society. This collection of essays is important to the field as all of the essays are very recently published and they demonstrate what research is being conducted in the field currently. That said, while it is a great publication within the field, I would like to offer some critiques on the collection.
What I believe to be the Strengths
Though this collection is arranged into sections, the essays within each section still argue very different topics. This goes for the collection overall as well; no two scholars cover the same topic or areas of the Atlantic world. Given this, every single essay argues a different point but can very broadly be grouped into somewhat similar categories. Some of the authors within this collection argue what the definition of piracy even is, and how it is better to understand it as a spectrum rather than a black and white classification. Other authors dive into the political and economic aspects of pirate society, and how they believed they should be analyzed. While this does not cover all of the topics discussed in the collection, the diversity of topics included in can be considered a strength. It allows there to be more coverage of the field overall and demonstrates how many different subtopics there are in the study of Golden Age Piracy. The diversity is also a strength because it is supported by David Head’s organization of the essays. Starting by having a section discussing the definition of piracy and arguing that it is a spectrum rather than a strict classification makes a lot of sense and works as a great starting point for the rest of the collection. This section is perhaps the strongest section of the collection, seeing as all of the essays within are also very clear and well written as opposed to some of the essays that follow. That said, there are also aspects of the diversity and organization that also create weaknesses to the The Golden Age of Piracy.
Weaknesses Within the Collection
After the first section of essays, the sections following progressively get weaker in organization and topics. The next section regarding the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, titled “Suppression of Pirates”, while also strong, does not have as strong of a concluding essay. Guy Chet’s article makes a big claim about when the Golden Age ended and utilizes weaker evidence than the other writers, and his argument goes against what the other essays in the same section argue. As a result, it creates a weird ending point for the section as a whole. The third section, “Modeling Piracy,” is the weakest aspect of this collection. While both essays included offer different ways to analyze piracy, they are also very unrelated to each other and create no sense of unity for the section beyond being different ways of analyzing piracy. Peter T. Leeson’s article studying the economics of piracy is also a weak ending point for the section, as he states that he is not a historian of any sort and rather an economist that simply enjoys history. Leeson still wrote a good essay, but it does not fit in well with the rest of the collection beyond being a recent work of scholarship in the field.
The last section of the book is fine, and works decently as a conclusion seeing as it discusses how piracy exists in current popular culture, though in comparison to the first two sections, the essays included are not as strong and do not carry the same sense of unity. David Head, the editor, in his conclusionary chapter discusses how the essays within each section are connected. While this is very helpful, it should have either been discussed rather at the beginning of the collection or at the end of each section as opposed to the end. If the connections were analyzed at the end of each section, it would have been much easier to understand and make the connections rather than seeing it after reading the entire collection. In conclusion, Golden Age of Piracy is a great show of recent pirate scholarship that is worth the read to those in the field, but perhaps would be better analyzed as completely individual works without trying to draw thematic connections between essays.
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