"Sociologist Matthew Norton's The Punishment of Pirates takes us on an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of pirates in the eighteenth century. Initially, piracy was a fertile ground for many enterprising and lawless young men to make fortunes on the high seas, due in no small part to the lack of policing by the British crown. But as the British empire moved away from a collection of far-flung territories toward a consolidated economic and political enterprise dependent on long distance trade, pirates suddenly became a tremendous threat. Norton shows us that eliminating this threat required an institutional shift toward first identifying and defining piracy, and then toward brutally policing it. The Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for understanding the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing, classifying, and constructing institutional order by tracing the transformation of piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity to a criminal category with violently patrolled boundaries-ending with its eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English empire. Replete with gun battles, executions, jail breaks, and courtroom dramas, Norton's book will offer insights for social theorists, political scientists, and historians alike"--

You won't need a bottle of rum to enjoy the exploits of these famous and fearsome swashbucklers. There's a galleon's worth of action in this awesome exploration of pirates--their weapons, adventures, legends, language, and lost treasures. See what life was really like aboard a pirate ship; Meet Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and a host of other villainous adventurers as they sail through the high seas in search of plunder; Learn about their ships, flags, and weaponry, from cutlasses to blunderbusses, sangrenels to musketoons. If you are looking for exotic desert islands and sword-wielding desperadoes, they are here, but you will also learn what life was really like for the scourge of the seas: what motivated them, what kept them together, the hardships they had to endure, and the adventures they sought

Presents information on the most ruthless pirates, including Henry Morgan, William Kidd, and Blackbeard, in a book with objects attached throughout.

The boobk covers the world of Pirates: ships and seafaring, maps, weapons, larger than life characters and larger than life stories are vividly presented.

This book shows how pirates were portrayed in their own time, in trial reports, popular prints, novels, legal documents, sermons, ballads and newspaper accounts. It examines how attitudes towards them changed with Britain’s growing imperial power, exploring the interface between political ambition and personal greed, between civil liberties and the power of the state. It throws light on contemporary ideals of leadership and masculinity - some pirate voyages qualifying as feats of seamanship and endurance. Unusually, it also gives insights into the domestic life of pirates and investigates the experiences of women whose husbands turned pirate or were captured for piracy. Pirate voyages contributed to British understanding of trans-oceanic navigation, patterns of trade and different peoples in remote parts of the world. This knowledge advanced imperial expansion and British control of trade routes, which helps to explain why contemporary attitudes towards piracy were often ambivalent. This is an engaging study of vested interests and conflicting ideologies. It offers comparisons with our experience of piracy today and shows how the historic representation of pirate behaviour can illuminate other modern preoccupations, including gang culture.

Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates—a riveting,thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival. In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International—and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting—Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits—physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror—Moore’s survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him—the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam—and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues. A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.

This comparative study of piracy and maritime violence provides a fresh understanding of European overseas expansion and colonisation in Asia. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.