![]() ![]() Emphasizing the hardship, injustice and brutality the average sailor faced in his career, Rediker suggests that piracy offered a more egalitarian seafaring life, as well as opportunities for revenge on the ruling class. For Rediker, pirates were bold subversives who challenged the prevailing social order and empire building of the five main trading nations. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Publishers Weekly Rediker (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea), a historian of maritime labor, opens his immensely readable study of the golden age of piracy (1716-1726) with the spectacle of an execution in which a notorious pirate, unrepentant and seemingly unconcerned to be facing death, reties the knot of his gallows noose with defiant ironic humor. ![]() Poor seamen, former slaves, and women who turned pirate raised issues respectively about class, race, and gender, he says, and the need and tendency to demonize a group as a threat to civilization was as alive then as now. of Pittsburgh) offers a social and cultural history of pirates and the reaction to them in the English colonies of North America. Focusing on the high-seas drama during the decade from 1716 to 1726, Rediker (history, U. ![]()
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