Pirates: The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650

'Pirates' hold enormous popular appeal as swashbuckling rogues performing feats of daring on high seas. Yet pirates' possess deeper meanings as they undertake a rich variety of cultural work: as allegories of religious and political issues; as actors in the theatre of empire; in terms of gendered behaviour, national, legal and racial identitites. Even the application of the term itself is contested since one person's 'pirate' is another 'privateer'. The new, inter-disciplinary essays in this col…