Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy

By Gabriel Kuhn

Over the last couple of decades, an ideological battle has raged over the political legacy and cultural symbolism of the "golden age" pirates who roamed the seas between the Caribbean Islands and the Indian Ocean from roughly 1690 to 1725. They are depicted as romanticized villains on the one hand and as genuine social rebels on the other. Life Under the Jolly Roger examines the political and cultural significance of these nomadic outlaws by relating historical accounts to a wide range of theoretical concepts—reaching from Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres to Mao Zedong and Eric J. Hobsbawm via Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. With daring theoretical speculation and passionate, respectful inquiry, Gabriel Kuhn skillfully contextualizes and analyzes the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and disability in golden age pirate communities, while also surveying the breathtaking array of pirates' forms of organization, economy, and ethics. Life Under the Jolly Roger also provides an extensive catalog of scholarly references for the academic reader. Yet this delightful and engaging study is written in language that is wholly accessible for a wide audience. This expanded second edition includes an appendix with interviews about contemporary piracy, the ongoing fascination with pirate imagery, and the thorny issue of colonial implications in the romanticization of pirates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781629638034

Gabriel Kuhn

Gabriel Kuhn (born in Innsbruck, Austria, 1972) lives as an independent author and translator in Stockholm, Sweden. He received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Innsbruck in 1996. His publications with PM Press include Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (2010; 2020); Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics (2010); Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings (2010); Erich Mühsam: Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings (2011); Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (2011; 2018), All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919 (2012), Turning Money into Rebellion (2014); Playing as if the World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Activism in Sports (2015); and Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture (2017).

Reviews for Life Under the Jolly Roger

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting take on pirate history, attempting to pick apart the ways in which Golden Age pirates are and aren't a useful reference point for radical activists. A lot of the usual criticisms of radicalism apply - very little attention is paid to the role of women, although at least he does repeat often that a slave-trading society should not be an uncritically accepted model for a radical utopia - but still, some good points. Kuhn isn't doing original historical research, which is a good thing, because he doesn't seem to have a good grasp on the history. (At one point he misinterprets "pirates were denied benefit of clergy at trial" to mean that pirates weren't given access to clergy before being executed, which is...not at all what that means.) If nothing else, the bibliography is phenomenal.