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Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. Edited by C. R. Pennell. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 351. Illustrations, contributors, permissions, index. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Bandits at Sea brings together a collection of essays delving into the complexities of piracy within larger socio-historical contexts. This book expressly avoids romanticizing the subject matter in favor of detailed, academic analysis. Editor C. R. Pennell asserts that many published works on pirates tend toward romantic accounts of adventure on the high seas and voyeuristic descriptions of pirate-perpetrated atrocities. Bandits at Sea attempts to fill a gap in the current literature with a series of pieces analyzing pirates and piracy in an academic format. While a handful of the articles were written expressly for this text, most were first published in diverse sources over the last two decades. Bandits at Sea brings them together in one, easily referenced text. This collection of essays addresses several core themes in the study of pirates and piracy. The first third of the text deals with problems of definition. How do various sources describe pirates? How are pirates different from and similar to privateers and corsairs? How does one distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate raiding? Topics include the tension between government and individuals and the consequences of that tension in politics and law; piracy as poised on the fulcrum of geography and socio-political circumstance; various historical attempts to delineate between legitimate and illegitimate raiding; the relationships between piracy and economics; and the concept that piracy might exist in the interstitial between lawful trade and criminality, warfare and commerce. Overall, this first section looks at the roles that geography, economics, and politics play in defining pirates. Authors include C. R. Pennell, Anne Pérotin-Dumon, David J. Starkey, John L. Anderson, and Gonçal López Nadal. The last two-thirds of Bandits at Sea further examines the previous threads of discussion through particular case studies. In addition to geography, economics, and politics, related issues come under scrutiny, including community, social organization, race, gender, and sexuality. While Pennell discusses worldwide piracy in the introduction, most of the articles focus on European sources and locations—as connected to Europe through either geography or colonization. Pennell cites the availability of records and issues of language as the primary reasons for this concentration. The most notable exceptions to the European focus are Dian Murray's two articles. The first discusses homosexuality among Chinese pirates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second examines the history of Cheng I Sao, the female leader of a six-fleet pirate confederation in China. Other authors in this section include Marcus Rediker, J. S. Bromley, Kenneth J. Kinkor, B. R. Burg, John C. Appleby, and Wendy Bracewell. Although the availability of historical sources problematizes development of a worldwide perspective on pirate studies, the authors of these articles analyze a wide range of subject matter and geographic areas. They have, in turn, highlighted the contextual complexity of pirates and their activities. With this collection, those swashbuckling heroes, or villains, ranging the wide seas in search of pillage and plunder, become individuals and groups situated firmly within their own geographic, political, economic, and historical contexts. Lisa J. Akey |
