Practices and Narratives of Early Modern Piracy: Connecting the Seas " engages with one of the most important and formative periods of pirate history, " identifies piracy as a major aspect of early modern economy, politics, and culture, " and embodies the interdisciplinary philosophy of Maritime Humanities by presenting a multifaceted transnational view of piracy from the point of view of different scholarly traditions with the aim of emphasizing the pivotal role seascapes play in early modern history and culture. Rather than looking at different manifestations of early modern piracy as geographically and temporally isolated cultural phenomena, Practices and Narratives of Early Modern Piracy: Connecting the Seas (15501800) pursues a comprehensive approach to this field of study. This volume investigates the spatial, temporal, and economic connections between pirates and other seafarers who navigated the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans in the early modern period, and the cultural products they inspired. With a specific focus on historical practices and cultural narratives it addresses issues such as the appearance of pirates and piratical protagonists in diverse geographical locations, changing negotiations of pirate identity, the fluid boundary between illegal piracy and state-sanctioned privateering, and the (trans)national economic entanglements of different forms of maritime predation. By bringing together the discussion of literary, cultural, and historical aspects of piracy and seafaring, the volume explores the cultural as well as the ideological impact and function of the pirate figure in early modern historiography, literature, and popular culture.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Practices and Narratives of Early Modern Piracy - Susanne Gruss
and Marcus Hartner
Part I. Political and Economic Entanglements
1 Pirate Marts and Knockdown Prices: Piracy, Class, and Economics in Early
Modern England - Claire Jowitt
2 Piracy and Sovereignty in the Indian Ocean: The British East India
Companys Campaign against Atlantic and Angrian Maritime Predation, 171724 -
David Wilson
3 Connecting Seas and Epochs: George Walker and Britains Privateers of
Force, 174448 - David J. Starkey
4 Surviving Scarcity: Reconceptualizing Tunisian Corsairing during the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries - Lama Elsharif
Part II. Pirate Mobility
5 Interconnected Identities: Seventeenth-Century Barbary Pirates, Christian
Captives, and Geo-Cultural Mobility - Jo Esra
6 Confinde to No Limits: John Ward, a Renegade Life in Print - Sue Jones
7 Wrestling with the Restless Sea: Piracy, European Expansion, and the
Further Beyond - Kevin P. McDonald
8 Anchors Found on High Mountains: Terraqueous Traffic and Pirate Mobility
in Walter Ralegh - Johannes Schlegel
Part III. Literary Accounts
9 Setting the Stage: Transnational Piracy and the Ambiguity of Pirate
Identity in the Stukeley Plays - Susanne Gruss
10 Commerce, Conflict, and Intercultural Contact: Figurations of Polyvalence
in Thomas Heywoods The Fair Maid of the West, Part I - Marcus Hartner
11 From Captive to Privateer: William Rufus Chetwoods The Voyages and
Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle (1726) - Stefanie Fricke
About the Contributors
Index
Susanne Gruss is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bamberg. Her research and publications focus on contemporary British literature and culture as well as on early modern England. Within these broad areas, her specialisms include gender studies and feminist theory, neo-Victorianism, and (film) adaptation; as well as collaboration and/in theatre, piracy, and (early modern) law and literature. Marcus Hartner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bielefeld University. His main areas of expertise include early modern English travel literature and (cognitive and historical) narratology, particularly the study of literary character. He is currently working on a monograph on early modern English captivity narratives and co-edits the Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (de Gruyter, with Nadine Böhm-Schnitker).
