The Punishment of Pirates: Interpretation and Institutional Order in the Early Modern British Empire

The British Empire grew from being a collection of far-flung territories to a consolidated economic and political enterprise dependent on long-distance trade, leading to the destabilizing threat of pirates. This development is traced by sociologist Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, which offers insights for social theorists, political scientists, and historians.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 19 January 2023
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Early in the seventeenth-century boom of seafaring, piracy allowed many enterprising and lawless men to make fortunes on the high seas, due in no small part to the lack of policing by the British crown. But as the British empire grew from being a collection of far-flung territories into a consolidated economic and political enterprise dependent on long-distance trade, pirates increasingly became a destabilizing threat. This development is traced by sociologist Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Norton shows us that eliminating this threat required an institutional shift: first identifying and defining piracy, and then brutally policing it. The Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for understanding the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing, classifying, and constructing institutional order by tracing the transformation of piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity to a criminal category with violently patrolled boundaries—ending with its eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English Empire. Replete with gun battles, executions, jailbreaks, and courtroom dramas, Norton's book offers insights for social theorists, political scientists, and historians alike.

Dimension: 229 x 152 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226823119
Edition number: 1