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The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2025
Abstract Claire Jowitt's Afterword focuses on the ways a poetic depiction of early modern pirates as economic radicals is both located in a particular time and space, and simultaneously can possess meanings that resonate with other temporal and spatial contexts. Samuel Rowlands’ 1613 poem “The Picture of a Pirat” focuses on the relationship between commerce and social degree. It is suggested that maritime predation, real and imagined, can operate as a cultural intermediary capable of speaking to overarching social, political, economic issues across time and space.
Keywords: pirates; poetry; Samuel Rowlands; commerce; economic radicals; social degree
According to Marcus Rediker, arguably the most influential historian of early modern piracy of the last forty years, “[o]ne way to think about the pirate ship is that it was a model of and for self-organized workers […] Exploited and abused wage workers came together to create a space of autonomy where they would, as one pirate put it, have ‘the choice in themselves’ about how to organize their lives.” For blue water empires within an international capitalist system, maritime outlaws represented a direct and subversive attack on the authority of the ruling social order and early modern nation states sought to brutally “pulverize” the pirates’ alternate social order. From this, it is easy to see how piracy came to be romanticised by both sailors and ordinary people and maritime outlaws seen as heroes within histories of class struggle and social protest. When the success of Golden Age pirates’ marauding and commercial activities either made them too conspicuously economically successful, or they broke out on a global scale, early modern state authorities decided to eliminate the piracy and pirates they were unable to control, intervening against them with the full force of state apparatus. Suppressing piracy was essential to early modern states because extra-legal violence at sea threatened the trade and order they sought to impose in home waters and overseas.
Rediker's model relates primarily to Atlantic world pirates from the Golden Age challenging the merchant and naval fleets of European nation states for sovereignty at sea. His argument is located in time and space and has become central to historiography about maritime predation within these historical and geographical boundaries.
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