Why Be a Bandit?

Catalog description

Bandits and outlaws have historically played a unique role in popular imagination. In the Chinese classic Water Margin, outlaws flee tyrannical administrators but eventually make their peace with the emperor. Robin Hood occupies an equally ambivalent position between outlaw and elite roles. Seventeenth and 18th-century Atlantic pirates were feared, but their ships are viewed by scholars as laboratories for democratic experiment. Pirates, bandits and insurgents often occupy similar marginal spaces between illegality and social legitimacy today. This course will study this ambiguous status, through historical cases and ending with banditry and border violence in Central Africa and in North America. 001534