Subject:
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Re: Pirate dissertation (long!)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.pirates
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Date:
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Tue, 23 Oct 2001 05:36:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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1514 times
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Hi! Maggie scolded me for hanging around in .pun while a
query went unanswered. :D What good is a historian who's
too busy in the dairy to chime in?
In lugnet.pirates, Magnus Lauglo writes:
> I hope it is OK to post this to this newsgroup, apologies for lack of any
> lego content. I'm hoping some pirate history buffs may be able to give me
> some pointers for my upcoming University dissertation.
Do you call it a dissertation there? We usually use that term
only when speaking of the doctoral thesis (Ph.D. or D.Phil).
> I am a third year history student, about to write my main dissertation on
> some social aspect of 1500 - 1800s era piracy. It is based on a course I
> have done on Law, Crime and Society in Early Modern England, and it would
> have to have a kind of social history perspective. Although I have always
> been interested in history in general, I don't know particularly much about
> piracy, it just seemed like it might make for an interesting topic (and the
> other topic I was "doing" for a while, didn't seem to be going anywhere).
>
> I have yet to decide exactly what I want to focus on, perhaps various
> portrayals of piracy by contemporaries, the government, folk literature, the
> pirates themselves, etc.
>
> Or possibly the social community of pirates; how aspects of uncommon
> democracy went hand in hand with ruthless violence. I might want to compare
> and contrast pirates with other sailors or other early modern era criminals
> (highwaymen, vagabonds), and see how they were portrayed or viewed differently.
>
> Any ideas or tips would be welcome. Are there any ideas as to which books
> would be best to start off with, both by modern historians and contemporary
> writers?
I'm assuming you want to explore piracy in its Caribbean
context; it was rampant all over the world in those times,
but the Eurocentric imagination is fixated on the Atlantic
case because the pirates were drawn from those societies.
Social aspects of Atlantic life are really just now coming
into focus--the divisions are being exposed as not so neat
as once thought. One place to start (and possibly the best,
given how recent it is) is:
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra:
Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic_ (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), which
should be about 15 quid or so in paperback ($18.00 US).
Now, Peter was a fairly severe Marxist, and I'm not sure if
he's still adamant on that--but the last time I saw him give
a talk, it really didn't ooze out of him. But he does take
the tack that piracy wasn't anything too abnormal, rather that it
was a manifestation of an Atlantic working class akin to the
Dick Turpin phenomenon of Tyburn-era England (which he also
wrote a book on, a few years back). If you bear in mind that
Linebaugh (possibly Rediker too, but I've never met him myself)
was a student of E. P. Thompson, his approach makes a lot more
sense (even if one disagrees with it). Rediker also has a more
Pirate-centered book, published in 1993 (_Between the Devil and
the Deep Blue Sea_, I think).
But if you want to come at scholarship starting with the pirates
and working outward, separating the wheat from the considerable
chaff is going to be a lot harder. That's to be expected, given
the popular romanticism that surrounds pirate legends (as evidenced
in the very theme of this newsgroup). Academic treatments of
pirates and piracy specifically are hard to find for the same
reason that academic treatments of the Middle Passage are lacking--
records are generally created only at the points of landfall.
If you dig in _Hydra_'s endnotes, you may find a lot of interesting
source material, though they don't use a lot of archival records--
mostly period publications and the like. Philip Gosse's 1931
history of piracy in the English colonies is probably still good
reading too.
David Cordingly (sp?) of the NMM in Greater London also has several
books and was responsible for a well-received exhibit on pirates.
I don't think you can go *anywhere* on a pirate-related topic
without at least consulting his work--the latest is _Under the
Black Flag_, according to Amazon, but I admittedly haven't been
keeping up.
So my short suggestion would be to start with Linebaugh/Rediker
and branch out from there, following their citations and your own
research.
> I need to locate as much as possible primary source material from the period
> (ie ballads, reports of piracy, laws about piracy etc). Can anyone point me
> in the direction for this kind of thing? Just how much contemporary
> literature exists on piracy?
It depends on how much archival research you're planning to do,
where you're located, and so forth. If you can get a letter of
introduction, I'd suggest getting a reader's ticket to the PRO
(Public Record Office) in Kew, Surrey (Kew Gardens Tube stop)
and one to the British Library at St. Pancras as well.
At the PRO, the ADM classes are extremely useful; the Royal Navy's
anti-piracy files will be found in those papers, inasfar as they
still exist--but a lot of it is going to be chaff. The site at
http://www.pro.gov.uk/ now has the main catalogue online, so you
can do some general digging to focus a search. The BL similarly
has its OPAC catalogue online. The BL is probably your best bet
to find personal papers or rare publications from private sources;
getting access is commensurately difficult, so a reference letter
is a must.
But pirates were both vilified and romanticized, and there was
a lot of popular ephemera floating around (much of which has not
survived, lamentably). But you may also wish to look in the
Times Index (London), which I believe is on CD-ROM now, and is
a fairly standard acquisition for Uni libraries. Other UK and
colonial papers are on fiche and microfilm. You may also want
to look at online indices of eighteenth- and seventeenth-century
documents, which are becoming very numerous now, at least in
English and regarding the Caribbean. A lot of the pirates were
French or had French crews, but I'm much less familiar with
any materials present in the Bibliotheque Nationale or scholarship
on French, Spanish, and Dutch pirates--they're usually subsumed
into a general category in English-language scholarship. But if
anything comes to mind I'll shout.
> Also, can anyone tell me if there are any good museums or exhibitions in the
> south of England that I might find useful to vist?
Unfortunately, I don't see the Pirates exhibit listed at the NMM.
But I can tell you that it's a great place to visit with your interest,
as a lot of the regular collection remains on display and the
expertise is still in situ! Moreover, as Larry P. and I found
out when we hiked over there last year (yes, we crossed paths in
London, of all places), the neighborhood is just *chock full* of
maritime-subject bookstores. A few afternoons spent there would
likely not be wasted, because I can tell you that those indie
bookstore proprietors are extremely knowledgeable about nautical
literature--more so than most professional historians, who usually
blanch at maritime and military histories as necessarily "base" and
"unsophisticated" (which is, of course, a load of horse manure).
The Golden Hinde, an interpretive replica of Drake's ship, is an
interesting visit:
http://www.goldenhinde.co.uk/
...but it won't be rewarding academically. They do, however, hire
really cute college co-eds to serve as the ship's staff. :D It's
on the south shore of the Thames.
However, for pirate-themed kitsch and museums (sometimes one and
the same; witness Salem, Massachusetts), you can't beat the US
East Coast between roughly South Carolina and Massachusetts. But
that's out, apparently, so I'm afraid I can't help you there.
Hope this helps!
best
LFB
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Pirate dissertation (long!)
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| Hi, Thanks everyone for all the input. Lindsay, you went well beyond the call of duty, very much appreciated! Thanks for pointing me towards those books, I hadn't heard of them before. Looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me! thanks again (...) (23 years ago, 24-Oct-01, to lugnet.pirates)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Pirate dissertation
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| Hello, I hope it is OK to post this to this newsgroup, apologies for lack of any lego content. I'm hoping some pirate history buffs may be able to give me some pointers for my upcoming University dissertation. I am a third year history student, (...) (23 years ago, 22-Oct-01, to lugnet.pirates)
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