Overview

This book explores pirate culture as radical social organization: a salty picture of anarchic pirate life, liberated, pleasurable and violent! Rebelling against hierarchical society and choosing the Jolly Roger, pirates entered the political spheres of anarchist organization and festival, with death and violence ever-present. Pirates created an upside-down world full of heroics as well as the deep horrors of life outside authority. Examining piracy as limited social rebellion,The Devil's Anarchy travels from the Hollywood pirate-as-hero to the stories of two great Dutch pirates: Claes Compaen, who terrorized the seas from 1623 to 1627, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who ruled the seas a half-century later. This unique focus on the politics of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring the first english translations of key Dutch texts, makes this a hugely entertaining book that provides insight into the real lives of these legendary bandits of the seas.

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9781570271618

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Snelders has made a major contribution to piratology by introducing certain rare Dutch sources full of anecdote and illumination. But he's contributed even more to the field of radical piratology: pirate as libertarian hero, pirate as symbolic focus for anti-Capital's desire. Rimbaud might've dreamed something like this when he was twelve. But here it is at last, a book of true stories.

Author Information

Stephen Snelders is a Dutch historian with a research focus on social and cultural transformation and resistance, in the spheres of the body as well as the mind. His publications include the books The Psychedelic Revolution and LSD Therapy (both in Dutch), as well as articles and essays on histories of labour movements, psychopharmacology, and genetics. He is the past editor of Pan (a leading research journal of psychotropic studies) and lives in Amsterdam, working alternately in and out of academic life.

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