Golden Age of Piracy: Why It Happened and How It Ended

Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pirates ruled the Atlantic world-from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, from Nassau to Madagascar. Yet piracy was not simply chaos at sea-it was a symptom of global change. The so called "e;Golden Age"e; emerged in the wake of imperial wars, collapsing economies, and the brutal transformation of maritime labor. When kings no longer paid...