PIRACY DURING THE AGE OF SAIL

Catalog description

This course will examine the rise of privacy in the Americas shortly after Spanish colonization through the American Revolution. The class will consider the consequences of state-sponsored piracy during the sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth centuries and the subsequent state-sponsored violence to eradicate pirates in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Students will engage with topics ranging from clashing imperial powers and Atlantic trade networks to disorderly maritime frontiers and the changing nature of maritime labor and culture. By delving deeply into the lives of common seamen, this course will seek to understand piracy from the bottom-up through a combination of careful reading of secondary sources and primary source documents by and about pirates.