Book Review

Comparative/World

Kris E. Lane knows that reckless adventure and amoral abandon have kept pirates in the public eye for centuries. Freethinking, rum-swilling, sexually rebellious cutthroats cannot avoid attention. Lane has a knack for good prose and a novelist's eye for detail: sordid, heroic, and ineffectual characters stalk his pages. But Lane is also a first-rate historian.	1
This imaginative and impressive synthesis is actually a world history approach to piracy. Written largely from the perspective of Spanish-American victims, the book contextualizes four waves of attacks on Spanish colonies from 1500 to 1750. French corsairs, English privateers, and Dutch pirates were all sanctioned to some degree by their respective nation-states. The book ends with freebooters like Captain Edward Teach (a. k. a. "Blackbeard"), who operated as private sea-robbers, attacking any likely prey and dodging all authorities. As Lane points out regarding this last group, "the freebooters' principal enemies were their own former masters, not the Iberian 'papists' of centuries past, and . . . it was primarily English property law rather than Spanish defensive resolve that finally wiped out the pirates" (p. 165). Spanish defenses generally remained ineffectual.	2
Lane's approach is refreshingly distinctive for several reasons. To begin with, he was trained as a historian of early Latin America, and he is concerned as much with the Spanish response as with the pirates' attacks. Seeking context rather than sensationalism, his inquiry is driven by questions: "How did over two centuries of piracy in the Americas affect colonial settlements on the Caribbean and Pacific islands and coasts? How severely did piracy disrupt trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific shipping? How effective were the various defensive measures employed over the years by Spain and its colonial subjects?" (p. 7).	. . .