28 July 2023
Since piracy鈥檚 Golden Age in the 17th and 18th centuries, tales of derring-do on the high seas have permeated popular literature before finding their way to stage and screen.
Dating roughly from the 1660s to the 1720s, the Golden Age of Piracy coincides with the consolidation and rapid expansion of the British Empire. That relationship between imperial expansion and piracy is an underexamined area of historical enquiry.
Traditional historiography has it that piracy experienced decline thanks to the consolidation of imperial authority 鈥� that the state and its enforcers - the British Empire and the Royal Navy respectively - gained a grip over previously lawless seas and imposed legal authority.
Emerging historical research has challenged this narrative. One historian working in this field is 吃瓜tv鈥檚 , Lecturer in Early Modern Maritime and Scottish History.
Dr Wilson鈥檚 research shows a far more nuanced and complex interplay between piratical activity and imperial authority. It sheds new light on the process of imperial expansion and offers insight into conflicts over space at land and sea - and where piracy ends and empire begins.
David arrived at 吃瓜tv as a history undergraduate in 2008 and has been here ever since 鈥� from Master鈥檚 to PhD to Lecturer. A 2022 recipient of a Teaching Excellence Award for Impact & Innovation he also speaks about his approach as an educator and what makes history at 吃瓜tv unique.
Pirates - myth and reality
Who were pirates, beyond the popular image of cutlasses, plank-walking and jolly rogers?
Dr Wilson stresses that, in the early modern period, piracy was essentially something that someone did, not what someone was; an identity attached to mariners of various stripe that could fall away at certain points in their seafaring careers.
鈥淎 pirate, first and foremost, is just a mariner. A pirate just becomes a pirate when they break the law through plunder on the high seas.
鈥淔or the vast majority, piracy is never meant to be a career for life. It鈥檚 an opportunistic act, maybe for a few years.
鈥淭he aim is always to return to landed society and get away with your plunder 鈥� otherwise what鈥檚 the point?鈥�
Dr Wilson dates the boom in public interest in piracy to the publication of Captain Charles Johnson鈥檚 The General History of the Pirates in 1724. This, ironically, is around the time when the Golden Age was showing signs of petering out.
The General History is a pulpy collection of biographical entries on pirates who have been captured. It includes all the big names: Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Jack Rackham and Bonnie Mary Read.
鈥淭he problem with the book is we know very little about the individuals themselves,鈥� says Dr Wilson. 鈥淎ll we really know is they got caught and executed, which why we have their story and understand some of the depredations they committed.
鈥淏ut Johnson fabricates and creates myth around these different individuals鈥� stories and these are later accepted as fact.鈥�
This mythos was a strong influence on Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Treasure Island gave us Long John Silver and crystallised the popular image of the pirate 鈥� cunning, ruthless, parrot on the shoulder.
Dr Wilson stresses the important in looking beyond the glamorous, romanticised names whose deeds are catalogued in Johnson鈥檚 book.
鈥淭hese are just the ones who got caught. The pirates who were actually successful are the ones we don鈥檛 know about.
鈥淭hese individuals were at the head of massive crews who we know very little about. Your typical pirates, rank and file mariners who take part in voyages, want to make a quick buck and get back to landed society.鈥�
Piracy and empire
Originally pursuing the topic of piracy through a general interest in maritime history and empire, Dr Wilson鈥檚 initial research looked at Jamaica which was the hub of piratical activity in the mid-17th century.
He began to see issues with the grand narrative of centralised empire-building snuffing out piracy and privateering. He contends that the actions of pirates were often integrated into these expanding empires and a key part of their early foundations.
He offers the example of Cortes and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Cortes was acting as an individual on his own behalf and in his own political and economic self-interest.
But once his conquest takes place and the Spanish Crown and Empire reap the benefits, his acts are absorbed into the official narrative and become part of the grand plan of imperial expansion. Wilson says this is indicative of the relationship between piracy and empire generally.
鈥淭he plans for empire were very loose, very fragmented and very ad hoc. That鈥檚 not to say that people weren鈥檛 driving these plans from Britain, Spain and other centres of empire. But individuals infiltrating these spaces and imposing certain ideas are absolutely key to empire-building.
鈥淧iracy is a very useful lens to view how that process happens at the frontline of these contests for space, both at land and at sea.鈥�
Dr Wilson explains that widespread piracy was a natural side-effect of the competition between empires in maritime space.
In the 17th century, this primarily was competition between the northern empires of France, the Netherlands and Britain against the Spanish and the Portuguese.
Eyeing the vast wealth flowing back from the Americas to the Iberian peninsula 鈥� and the military and political edge this wealth gave the Spanish and Portuguese in Europe 鈥� northern Europeans began devising ways to cut in on the action. Plunder was a relatively simple method.
But, says Dr Wilson, another reason for the flourishing of piracy was that pirates provided access to different goods and enslaved peoples that Europe-based merchants weren鈥檛 able to provide to their colonies.
With colonies spawning new markets, pirates were able to step in to provide access to a wider range of goods and at cheaper prices.
By the 18th century, a series of reforms make it more productive for colonies to trade within the transatlantic imperial system than work on its fringes and pirates begin to lose their influence. This, for Wilson, explains the decline of piracy far better than the heroics of the British Navy.
Decolonising the curriculum
As an academic working in maritime history, Dr Wilson鈥檚 research inevitably focuses on colonialism and its lingering effects. His work with the One Ocean Hub explicitly focuses on colonial legacies on the coastlines of Ghana, South Africa and Namibia.
A growing number of academic institutions have made explicit commitments to 鈥渄ecolonise the curriculum鈥�. But what has been the impact in the classroom so far?
鈥淒ecolonisation is not about taking books off the curriculum, it鈥檚 about adding books to the curriculum.
鈥淚鈥檝e definitely seen an incredibly positive change to include more perspectives from African scholars, Indigenous scholars and other non-European scholars. With the history that I teach, it鈥檚 really important to try and get those perspectives too.鈥�
He says that there has been an important shift away from ideas that the perspectives or individual experiences of enslaved persons cannot be accessed through the surviving historical sources, and that new methods in analysis and interpretation seek to bring these through.
鈥淲hile it鈥檚 difficult to get a written or first-hand perspective from an enslaved person, we can read against the grain of the sources we use to access those perspectives.
鈥淚f you don鈥檛 understand what was happening with Indigenous policies or African empires or other African communities, then you only get part of the story of the Atlantic and those who are shaping it. And that鈥檚 not good enough.鈥�
Dr Wilson says that one issue with teaching colonial history is that when using sources, it can be easy for students themselves to slip into the language, assumptions and prejudices in sources.
It鈥檚 important then to encourage critical thinking about the source, its language and the voices and perspectives that are essentially excluded from written sources.
鈥淚f you can get them to do that, then it doesn鈥檛 just make for better history, it makes them better thinkers.鈥�