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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.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
A Note on Citations
Introduction: Monstrous Business
1 A General History of
General History Monsters
2 “Let Us Make a Hell of Our Own”: The Pirate as Monster
3 The “Borders of the Possible”:
General History, Commerce, and Empire
Interlude
4 “Pirate Vices, Publick Benefits”: The Social Ethics of Piracy in the 1720s
Great Men
5 Plutarch on the Spanish Main: Pirates and “Great Men”
6 “Their Crimes conspir’d to make ’em Great”: Piracy and the Spectacle of Law
Conclusion
Appendix: Editions of
General History of the Pyrates Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
NOEL CHEVALIER teaches English at Luther College at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. The author of several articles on pirates and pirate literature, he has also edited an edition of David Garrick and George Colman’s
The Clandestine Marriage and, with Min Wild, coedited
Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century (Bucknell University Press).
