Charles Johnson`s "General History of the Pyrates" and Global Commerce
Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850;
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14 165 Ft
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Product details:
- Publisher John Wiley & Sons
- Date of Publication 30 June 2025
- Number of Volumes Paperback
- ISBN 9781684485536
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages198 pages
- Size 235x156x13 mm
- Weight 285 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 8 B-W images 700
Categories
Short description:
Examining how Charles Johnson’s 1724 bestseller General History of the Pyrates depicts figures like Blackbeard both as monsters and Great Men, Noel Chevalier explores how the work untangles the contradictions within a fiercely capitalist slave-trading Britain emerging as a colonial superpower, where ruthlessness and ambition were both feared and praised.
MoreLong description:
A bestseller upon its publication in 1724, Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates shaped public perceptions of piracy with its portraits of such legendary figures as Blackbeard, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and Bartholomew Roberts. Yet despite influencing everything from Treasure Island to Peter Pan, Johnson’s book has yet to be taken seriously as a literary work in its own right.
This study explores how General History of the Pyrates was at the heart of early eighteenth-century British debates about commerce, colonialism, and law. Examining how pirates are depicted as both monsters and Great Men, Noel Chevalier untangles the contradictions within a Britain emerging as a colonial superpower, where ruthlessness and ambition were both feared and praised. Traveling the high seas to plunder treasure from foreign lands, pirates were not so different from the British capitalists who built fortunes from resource extraction, the plantation economy, and the transatlantic slave trade. Connecting the work to later books like Gulliver’s Travels and The Beggar’s Opera that satirized the era and its power-hungry prime minister Robert Walpole, Chevalier shows how the pirate became an iconic figure in 1720s Britain, a time of cold-hearted capitalism and rapacious colonial expansion.
"Chevalier's new monograph on the General History is absolutely indispensable for anyone with any investment in Golden Age pirate studies. Clear-eyed and richly contextualized, this is the work we have all been waiting for on this most essential and least understood of source texts."
