Pirates and their Enemies

This subject will investigate a very old phenomenon: maritime raiding, or 'piracy'. The subject will concentrate on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries when sea raiding activity interacted across the world system, but particularly in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic/West Indies. Students will address issues of how different definitions of piracy and corsairing have arisen in international law, the social economic and political motivations underlying sea-raiding and the relationship between pirates and other individual sea-raiders and the state, and efforts at control, both by the victims and by state action. It will also examine the personal social and sexual strategies that pirates adopted. We will also examine the ways in which pirates have been presented in fiction and film and the uses to which popular culture has put the phenomenon of piracy.