Mark G. Hanna's multi-prize-winning book traces the rise and fall of piracy in the early modern British empire. The story begins with the origins of piracy in the ambitious seafaring families of Elizabethan England. Drawn mostly from the South West, they took to sea with patriotic and, for some, godly motives to attack Spanish shipping and support early English colonization. Thereafter the story traces these mariners’ activities from Ireland to the Barbary Coast, and from debates in the Palace of Westminster to slave plantations in the Caribbean. While the narrative regularly traverses the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, its focus is mainly upon the relationship between the pirates and the American colonies. This relationship was based on reciprocal benefits, and herein lies Hanna's key insight regarding the rise and fall of piracy in the British Empire. For we moderns “pirates” summons up images of seafaring rogues brandishing cutlasses; alternatively, an important and long-standing historiographical interpretation portrays them as a maritime proletariat, possessed of a political consciousness that reflected their shared exploitation by capitalism's era of primitive accumulation. Hanna is less interested in anonymous Jack Tars or seamen as collective workers. His pirates are frequently gentry figures, such as the second Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, whose image graces the book's cover and who eagerly participated in English overseas expansion – combining piety, plantations, and plunder. In an era of legal plurality and territorial uncertainty, these piratical pioneers opened up new opportunities and provided specie-poor settlements with badly needed gold and silver coin. Moreover, at a time when the ambitions of emerging European states exceeded their administrative capacities, pirates were also a crucial paramilitary force which figured in scraps with the Spanish, Dutch, and French across the seventeenth century. Although regularly disapproved of, pirates were nevertheless intrinsic characters on the early colonial and Atlantic scene.

Chapters 3 and 4 consider the pirates’ role in the seizing of Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s and their subsequent move north to the continental colonies. In the service of Cromwell's Western Design, English pirates became privateers fighting on behalf of the emerging English state. This identified pirates with the establishment of English authority in the Caribbean, a context in which they are most often reimagined, not least in a recent and prominent film franchise. In reality, there was less swashbuckling and a great deal of social and economic nitty-gritty concerning the establishment and running of early settlements, all of which Hanna presents with admirable concision and style. In brief, pirate involvement in Jamaica encouraged the early settlement of a mixed plantation, maritime, and urban economy featuring small and large planters. The large planters were eager to turn Jamaica into a slave society along the lines of Barbados, but their ambitions were limited by their dependency on the pirates as security against the Spanish, ensuring a long and incremental shift to the brutal and exploitative slave society of the early eighteenth century. The specie the pirates earned and looted also made them attractive to merchants in the northern colonies, where buccaneers featured in colonial conflicts such as King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion. Hanna's research recovers the crucial role of pirate paramilitaries in the wider colonizing process. In early print, cultural pirates were often lionized as defenders against Indian and Spanish attacks, as well as criticized as rapacious brigands. The reality was more humdrum: pirates were landowners and church members, their seafaring often sporadic or seasonal. They were disapproved of in the royal colony of Virginia, but welcomed in the specie-poor coastal towns of the middle and New England colonies, who gladly catered to their hospitality and refitting needs and welcomed the supply of slaves and coin.

The remaining chapters consider the change in English attitudes post-Glorious Revolution and the previously described war against the pirates. By the late seventeenth century, piracy was an integral feature of seaport economies at Boston, Newport, and New York. It flourished for a variety of reasons: the royal monopolies, in particular of the slave trade, which encouraged commercial contraband; the aforementioned supply of specie to cash-strapped and war-torn colonial economies; the weakness of the English Navy and need for pirate muscle for external and internal threats. Beginning in the 1690s each of these conditions changed, and pirates increasingly became targets for suppression as part of general assertion of imperial control from London. Reviewing the various reports and legislative measures, Hanna shows that the London-backed war against the pirates was crucial, and emblematic of a wider debate concerning the relationship between central authority and colonial peripheries in an expanding British Empire. There were some in the colonies who feared enhanced crown authority more than they did piracy, and London had to do more than merely ratchet up naval authority and limit colonial liberties. Most importantly, the expansion of trade and increase in colonial prosperity after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) allowed for the development of transatlantic bonds of investment and consumption with no need for piratical support. As William Penn observed, “it is trade must make America valuable to England and if the industry of inhabitants be not encouraged and well conducted … colonies will either sink or become a great charge to the crown … Here lies the clinch of the business” (quoted at 291).

The final two chapters offer a fascinating discussion of early eighteenth-century connections between piracy, currency shortages, and slave importations and revolts, and the impact of rising print culture on piratical public relations. The codification of imperial laws and suspension of erstwhile monopolies, particularly the slave trade, refined distinctions between legal privateering and criminal piracy and opened up trade, adding further to colonial prosperity. The buccaneers’ utility as providers of security services, desirable goods, and hard cash diminished: colonists worried more about pirates’ felonious practices and the stirring up of slave populations and could get their silks and calicoes through legitimate suppliers. Where once they were considered legitimate or at least tolerated colonial characters, pirates now became outlaws. The power of print turned against them, offering sensational stories of picaresque characters’ pirate cruelty and their challenge to social hierarchy, market capitalism, and even gender norms. In the process they fabricated reports of pirate violence, multiracial crews, the stirring up of slave populations, and general resistance to imperial authority. Newspapers condensed the world, allowing merchants to grasp the interconnection of players in far-flung markets. In the process one-time heroes became hellhounds. In Hanna's telling the war against the pirates was less about central authorities shutting down a profitable colonial sideline, and more a common imperial project aimed at enhancing trade and noteworthy for the manner in which it integrated metropolitan center and colonial periphery.

It is at this point that Hanna comes closest to joining critiques of the aforementioned and long-standing interpretation of pirates as a distinctive class of maritime worker with a particular contribution to the development of the Atlantic trade and capitalism – although, at least for this reviewer, I am not sure Hanna is concerned to take a position either way. His achievement throughout the book has been to craft a subtle and nuanced understanding of pirates and piracy as products and ultimate victims of empire, rather than engage in a gauche refutation of previous scholarship. Thus he raises a skeptical eyebrow at those who might have read lurid printed accounts as reportage rather than fabrication, but leaves open the possibility that the imperial repression may have generated pushback that gave aspects of the war against the pirates the character of a rebellion of common and picaresque seamen against an oppressive system of labour exploitation. At the very least there was room enough for a variety of mariners and vessels on the early modern high seas.