This really is the best journalism about Somali piracy I have read. It is immensely sympathetic to the ordinary crewmen, many often belonging to the global South, who are the victims of the piracy. But it also shows the extent to which piracy itself is today a form of enterprise; with wage workers who are starving […]
10 February 2015 Everything anticipated our entry into what I can only call security seas. There are ships that do not send signals: they turn out to be warships of a sort, small, compact, going only at 7 knots with a marking of F571 their only distinguishing feature off the coast of Yemen. There is […]
Just check out this incredibly fabulous painting of Hayreddin Barbarossa and Sinan Reis, 16th century pirates extraordinaire… (thanks Orit).
They are EVERYWHERE! Here is Michael Dirda writing about campy pirates: Many [film pirates] are also distinctly camp. The first pirate most of us encounter is Captain Hook, who, as played by Cyril Ritchard in the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan, glories in the mincing affectation and extravagance of a boisterous drag queen (there were, […]
Pirate Utopias is a strange little book – at once a bit disappointing and a portal to further discovery. The concept behind it is fabulous enough (about which more below) and the blurbs on the back -by Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh- give one whiplash until you read them closely and they all hold […]
There is a kind of romance around piracy. It is the romance of anti-authority figures and of a life lived not just in the margins but outside the boundaries. Just think about the masses of novels and films about piracy and the scholarship (and I will eventually write about Marcus Rediker’s extraordinary work). Or think […]
