This should not be a new framework to anyone with any awareness of history - I would say 'through a Marxist lens' but what I really mean is, through a realistic lens. This is a book arguing that the, err, phenomenon of Atlantic piracy was primarily class rebellion, and framing the people who participated in it as being victims of a predatory and hopeless class system (true) actualized in both the existing seafaring wage system and in slavery (true) who saw piracy - which is to say, robbery primarily at sea - as their only ticket to advancement or freedom. It has two stars here and not one for readability and perhaps accidentally interesting anecdotes, peppered in to buttress a terrible point.
I approach a leftist book on Atlantic piracy being from the self-selecting group of people who would have ever sought out a leftist book on Atlantic piracy in 2006, and would still be thinking about it in 2018. That's a fancy way of saying that I am not sitting back here cracking open a Soylent and ragging on the differing traditions and standards of historiography as 'soft,' namby-pamby, emotional compared to cold, hard quantitative fact or whatnot. (Though more defensive of the arts, and more personally located there.) I understand many humanities students' and scholars' resentment of the derision and anti-intellectualism they face from both the ignorant public and, frankly, the STEM fields - and I agree that derision often has a disturbing conservative or libertarian subtext that tries to distill the pursuit of truth into something that can be managed without interdisciplinary thought. Now, I tend to be defensive of the humanities. This book accidentally prompted me into skepticism of the massive accountability issues in humanities scholarship, at a young, tender, and idealistic age.
Another review of something I read a long time ago.
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