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The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America (2014)

door Douglas R. Burgess Jr.

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The untold story of how colonial pirates transformed America and brought it to the brink of rebellion
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1-5 van 10 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
A fine academic treatment of the problems posed by pirates operating in America from the 1690s to the 1730s. Burgess takes a political and legal approach to the difficulties of the English Crown's attempts to make the colonies take a harder view towards pirates. Early in the era the colonists benefited from privateers and pirates and so had no desire to arrest or try colonial pirates. As long as the actual piratical acts occurred in the Indian Ocean or the Caribbean the colonists were happy to turn a blind eye. Only once piracy became less profitable and the pirates began turning on colonial ships did the colonial leaders take firm steps to stamping out piracy. Nice, informative account of a lively period. ( )
  kkunker | Aug 14, 2015 |
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
Quick review: The subject is almost completely outside my area, but I found the author provided enough context, historical and historiographical, and made very clear arguments, so I found the book very readable. It's also full of great examples and vivid descriptions.

After the anecdote-as-hook, a really excellent historiography, which caught me up on Atlantic Colonial history quickly, and a quick source review, Burgess boldly blames England for both piracy and the colonies participation in and endorsement of it and argues that piracy created and reflected the relationship between colony and metropole. These are the kind of arguments we like to see! There were moments that I felt dramatic music should accompany the text, but that also made it an easier read.
Chapters one and two give all necessary background- both legal and then a concrete, and succinct, example in Jamaica. In the third chapter, Burgess plainly states his case and framework- which the reader is in a much better position to understand after reading the previous chapters and getting an example in New York. Piracy was a crime at the close of the 17th century according to the Crown, however, when examining the thirteen colonies of North America, one should not presume that English law and practice are the best framework. In the colonies, “Piracy and smuggling became enmeshed within the social and legal structure by degree.” Additionally, the Governor’s particular responsibility to both the Crown and the best interests of his colony further obfuscate the line between legitimate and illegitimate trade activities. The colonial governors of the late 17th century “inherited” both the practice of granting commissions and the established legal structure that legitimized practices that the Crown declared illegal. Furthermore Burgess argues that these legal evolutions were primarily local and cannot be separated from the political and religious frameworks within which they were developed.

Part II, made up of chapters four, five and six, focus on 1696, the creation of the Board of Trade, and the mutiny, piracy, and trial of Henry Every’s crew. The mutiny and raid on a ship belonging to King Aurengzeb created an international crisis which both highlighted the extent of the problem of piracy, in particular the colonies complicity in these crimes, and the opportunity for the Crown to make it’s stance very clear once and for all. Chapter five has one of the best chapter introductions I’ve ever read, and narrates the two trials of some of Every’s crew. Despite the eventual guilty verdicts, Burgess demonstrates how the trials were ultimately failures, but how the crisis also incited important changes in perspective and strategy for both the Crown and the colonies. Chapter 6 outlines the media’s role in shaping ideas about piracy in both England and its North American colonies. This study demonstrates how different the crown and its subjects ideas were. The subsequent three chapters cover three case studies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. In Chapter ten Burgess argues that the Resumption Bill’s failure demonstrates the limits of the Crown’s power, and goes into greater detail about the sundry perspectives on colonial self-government. Finally, Burgess argues that the shift of the pirate from community member to outsider and the decreasing revenue a colony could expect from pirate gains changed the colonies attitudes into something more aligned with the Crown’s.

The Politics of Piracy is readable, clearly argued, and a valuable new perspective on both piracy and Crown/colony relationships more generally.
  becca.b | Jul 11, 2015 |
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
A different perspective on Atlantic piracy during the late seventeenth century than we tend to get from Marcus Rediker and others. Burgess focuses on the legal and political squabbles over piracy which set colonial and crown officials at loggerheads, while also emphasizing the key differences between colonial administrations on these questions. He makes clear just how close some colonial leaders were to certain well-known pirates and their associates, and argues that the key disagreements over interpretation of piracy laws can be seen as precursors to the constitutional struggles which eventually doomed England's hold over her North American colonies.

Pretty dense, and probably not for the casual reader, but a very good addition to the literature. ( )
  JBD1 | May 12, 2015 |
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
I found this book educational, an interesting read, and also so frustrating. I was happy to learn more about the intricacies of political involvement in Piracy, and reactions to such, etc. But I felt like the book needed more pirates! A few more actual pirates being used as examples, or to illustrate a point, would have been quite welcome. I don't need legends and myths, but actual piratical involvement would have been nice in this text. It was easy to read, and easy to get lost in - I did enjoy reading what was there. I felt like this author had a bit of a chip on the shoulder, with some of the comments about other pirate histories and such. It's definitely worth reading for the history, opinions & theories. And it left me wanting to learn more about the politics of the time, which is a huge thing - I hate politics!

A good read, not sure if I'd buy it, but I would for sure put a hold on it at the library! ( )
  camelama | Apr 7, 2015 |
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.
The Politics of Piracy makes the case that in the years around the 1690s, the governors of Britain's North American colonies aided and supported piracy in the Red Sea, and that the efforts of authorities in Britain, represented by the Board of Trade, to curb or control this support were essentially useless until changing conditions made the governors withdraw their support on their own terms.

While obviously coming from within the academic writing community, it's clearly and cogently written, and makes good use of primary sources - especially the trans-Atlantic correspondence between colonial governors and agents, and British authorities such as the Board of Trade. Through the vehicle of looking at piracy law, it creates an excellent glimpse of what governance was actually like in the first century of the British colonies, when connections with Britain were sometimes tenuous, the population was small enough that nearly everyone knew of nearly everyone, and nothing was quite established yet. I was especially tickled by the story of the time the mother country asked Rhode Island to please send a copy of its laws, and then wrote back six months later to say, okay, please send a copy where the handwriting is legible.

However, for a book that's ostensibly about piracy, the pirates themselves make very few appearances in this book, and only around the edges. The only pirate whose story is given any substantial discussion is Henry Every; other pirates are mentioned in passing as if the reader is expected to already be intimately familiar with their histories (Tew, Kidd) or simply as lists of names that came up in governmental correspondence. There is little to no discussion of the pirates' own politics - not to mention their motivations for seeking piracy, their economic roles, their numbers and demographic, or, with the notable exception of Every, what their pirating actually involved. The pirates, in Burgess's account, come off as simply blank pawns in a game between the governors and the Board of Trade. This lack of pirates doesn't just make the book something of a disappointment for anyone who comes to it out of an interest in 17th/18th century piracy, it also serves to weaken the book's main argument.

This becomes especially apparent in the book's final chapter, when he moves beyond establishing the state of affairs in the 1690s - when the colonial governors gave open-ended, dubiously legal 'privateering' commissions to local shipowners, so that they could sail to the Indian Ocean and bring income back to the colonies - to the 1710s and 20s, when the governors began turning against piracy because of a shift in how the pirates affected their colonies. With so little context for piracy in general, for why the trade moved out of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea (or indeed, why it went there in the first place), or even any real discussion of how the pirates' money and presence benefited the colonies during the period when they were supported there, it's hard to buy any of his arguments once he leaves the limited milieu of the wrangling for control between the Governors and the Board of Trade over Indian Ocean piracy.

In fact, I suspect there's a stronger (and more interesting) argument to be made that the situation in the 1690s, and the specific trade of established British captains sailing to India under North American privateering commissions, is an exceptional case. It may even be that while that specific trade was important to the North American colonies, and certainly led to the most spectacular prizes, it may not even have been relevant to the majority of pirates at the time. Certainly there is nothing in Burgess' book to present evidence either way, and iirc from the last time I read in the academia of piracy (about ten years ago, admittedly), local coastal piracy in my home colony proceeded pretty much undaunted from the late 17th century until the rise of steam.

The absolutely exclusive focus on a small group of upper-class white British men (with bit parts to the feebly annoyed Great Mughal and his poor, tragically violated beautiful daughter, oh, and some revolting natives that got one line) began to grate after awhile as well, especially as the history of British policies in India loomed larger and larger over events, and yet was granted no voice at all in events. I guess I've just gotten used to histories that occasionally acknowledge people other than upper-class white British men as actors.

I'm sure part of this is the result of the realities of academic history (which I end up complaining about every time I read a book like this): that following all the context leads to an endless web of research; and that one can only write about primary sources where the primary sources exist. That said, in this particular book Burgess would probably have been better off sticking to that very specific context of the Governors and the Board of Trade, and not trying to use that to speak about the roles of pirates more generally.

Tl;dr: it's an interesting and well-written book about politics in the American colonies in the late 17th century, and covers ground that very few other histories discuss; it doesn't really say much about the pirates themselves; more context would have been really nice even to someone who's got some background in parts of the history; I wish this had instead been a book about how Indian Ocean piracy in the late 17th/early 18th century involved political and economic interactions between the American colonies and the Mughal empire as mediated by British trade policy, because I bet that's a way more important story. ( )
  melannen | Mar 6, 2015 |
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