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WORK TITLE: Pirate nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740
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https://history.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/hanna.html * https://history.ucsd.edu/_files/faculty/hanna/CV.pdf * http://www.lajollalight.com/sdljl-shiver-me-timbers-history-professor-debunks-myths-2011oct26-story.html * https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/114931/chet-hanna-pirate-nests-and-rise-british-empire-1570-1740-and-mcdonald
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 1996; Harvard University, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, lecturer, 2004-07; University of California, San Diego, assistant professor, 2007-14, associate professor, 2014-, founding associate director of Institute of Arts & Humanities, 2016-; College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, visiting assistant professor, 2008-10; San Diego Maritime Museum, CA, Robert and Laura Kyle Endowed Chair in Maritime History, 2014-. Member of editorial board for Mains’l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History.
AWARDS:Arthur H. Cole Award, Economic History Association, 2009; Public Scholarship Award, 2013-15, distinguished teaching award, 2015, both University of California, San Diego, 2013-15; outstanding faculty award, UCSD Panhellenic Association, 2016; John Ben Snow Book Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, and Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, both 2016, both for Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. Grants and fellowships from organizations, including Harvard University, John Carter Brown Library, Huntington Library, American Numismatic Society, Library Company, William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, University of California, San Diego, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and book reviews to publications, including Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Journal of Maritime History. Contributor of chapters to books, including Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories, Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era, Pirates in Print: Seafaring Treasures of the Mandeville Collections, and Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History.
SIDELIGHTS
Mark G. Hanna is a writer and educator based in La Jolla, California. He is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to joining the university as an assistant professor in 2007, Hanna worked as a lecturer at Harvard University, from which he obtained a Ph.D. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University. In 2014, Hanna became the Robert and Laura Kyle Endowed Chair in Maritime History at the San Diego Maritime Museum. He has served on the editorial board of Mains’l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History and has written articles that have appeared in scholarly publications, including Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Journal of Maritime History.
In 2015, Hanna released his first book, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. The volume is the winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the John Ben Snow Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. In the book, Hanna dispels myths about pirates that have persisted through the ages. Among the myths he discusses are that pirates were vicious criminals. In an interview with Will Bowen, contributor to the La Jolla Light Web site, Hanna noted: “Many pirates eventually settled down to respectable lives. … And pirates were very different in different time periods. The Johnny Depp portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow would only be valid for the very short time period of 1713 to 1730.”
In the first half of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 Hanna describes the establishment of pirate networks (or nests) surrounding European colonies in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and off the coast of North America. He explains that piracy was an important part of the economies of many of the colonies. Pirates were accepted members of society, not marginalized, as they have been depicted in literature and film. Hanna goes on to discuss the ways in which the British government defined piracy, noting that its definition was never very clear. The British did not always prosecute pirates because of the vague laws surrounding piracy. In the second half of the book, Hanna explains how changes in the British Empire are connected to changes in piracy. During the late seventeenth century, London became the capital of the British Empire. Before that time, provinces each carried their own respective authority. London’s establishment as the central location for the government allowed the British to develop a more solid stance on piracy. Government leaders determined to break up pirate nests, as they believed having nests of English pirates made the government appear weak. They used popular literature and the courts to convince their constituents in Great Britain and in the colonies that piracy needed to be stopped. However, they supported privateering for another century.
Reviewing the book in the Journal of Southern History, Trevor Burnard commented: “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 is a valuable addition to a sparse literature on politics in this period.” However, Burnard added: “The text is overwhelmed by a massive number of digressive footnotes. … The fetish for overextensive footnoting, combined with some lapses in copyediting, mar what is a vigorously argued work that shines light into a period of American history that needs more attention.” Paul Monod, critic in the Canadian Journal of History, suggested: “Hanna’s book is large, complicated and not always easy to read. He has trolled British and colonial archives assiduously, but he seems reluctant to leave out any information that he has found there. His footnotes are obese.” Monod concluded: “In spite of these faults, the importance of the book is without doubt. By drawing out the wider economic and social significance of pirate activity in the English Atlantic world, Hanna has written the best contextual overview of piracy now in print.” “This fine work enriches and displays the maritime foundations of the British Empire,” asserted B.M. Gough in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. Gough described the book as “highly recommended.” A contributor to the Civil War Talk Web site, remarked: “This is a must have book for your reference library. This book really destroys a lot of Hollywood pirate myths. … A good read.” Guy Chet, writer on the H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online Web site, suggested: “Hanna uses literary sources to read eighteenth-century culture and values. And while social and cultural historians might express a measure of skepticism, literary scholars will appreciate his approach to print sources as useful guides to the general public’s sensibilities. Hanna’s focus on the cultural power of the press, rather than on naval power, is appropriate.” Chet also stated: “Hanna’s main narrative is enriched by copious notes that will reward readers with a wealth of data, as well as entertaining and engrossing historiographical context. UNC Press has done readers a favor in providing footnotes, as this important component of the book would have been lost in endnotes. Lamentably, the book does not feature a bibliography, but at 450 pages, this is understandable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Journal of History, winter, 2016, Paul Monod, review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, p. 573.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, B.M. Gough, review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, p. 1534.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Trevor Burnard, review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, p. 143.
ONLINE
Civil War Talk, https://civilwartalk.com/ (October 23, 2016), review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (March, 2016), Guy Chet, review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740.
La Jolla Light, http://www.lajollalight.com/ (April 21, 2017), Will Bowen, author interview.
University of California San Diego, Department of History Web site, https://history.ucsd.edu/ (December 8, 2016), Paul Monod, review of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire; (April 21, 2017), author faculty profile and curriculum vitae.
Mark G. HannaAssociateProfessorDepartment of HistoryUniversity of California, San DiegoFounding Associate Director of the Institute of Arts & HumanitiesHonorary Curator of the Hill Collection of Pacific VoyagesRobertand Laura Kyle Endowed Chair inMaritime History, San Diego Maritime MuseumAcademic Senate Distinguished TeacherHSS: 9500 Gilman Drive #0104; La Jolla, CA 92093-0104Phone: (619) 849-9385 / Fax: (858) 534-7283m1hanna@ucsd.eduEDUCATION-HARVARD UNIVERSITYPh.D. June 2006, History of American CivilizationDissertation: The Pirates’ Nest: The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1670-1740Advisors: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Joyce Chaplin, andJill Lepore-YALE UNIVERSITYB.A., May 1996. Major: History. Advisor:John Demos. Awarded Distinction in the Major. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE-UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, Associate Director, Institute of the Arts & Humanities, 2016-Present.-UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, AssociateProfessor,History Department, 2014-Present.-SAN DIEGO MARITIME MUSEUM, Robertand Laura Kyle Endowed Chair in Maritime History, 2014-Present.Editorial Board for Mains'l Haul-A Journal of Pacific Maritime History.-UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, AssistantProfessor, History Department, 2007-2014.-THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY, Visiting Assistant Professor, History Department, 2008-2010. -HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Lecturer, History and Literature Concentration, 2004-2007RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND WORK IN PROGRESS--Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740(Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute Series,University of North Carolina Press, 2015).-Infamous Designation: The Discourse of Piracy, Slavery, and Empire in the Early Modern World: 1600-1900(Book Projectin Progress)-“The Pirates Hidden from Early American History,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (forthcoming).-“Protecting the Rights of Englishmen: The Rise and Fall of Carolina‟s Piratical State” In Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories, Edited by Brad Wood and Michelle Lemaster, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013).-“Smuggling.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. Ed. Trevor Burnard. (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2013).http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/atlantic-history#4-“Well-Behaved Pirates Seldom Make History: A Reevaluation of English Piracy in the Golden Age” In Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era, Edited by Peter C. Mancalland Carole Shammas; (University of California Press, 2015).-Pirates in Print: Seafaring Treasuresof the Mandeville Collections.Digital Exhibit.
2http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/piratesinprint/-Early San Diego: On the Edge of Empires. Digital Exhibit http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/edgeofempires/-Entries for “John Smith” and “The Navigation Acts”in The Encyclopedia of US Political History (MTM Publishing) 2009.-Review of Peter Leeson's “The Invisible Hook”in The International Journal of Maritime History(Vol. 21, no. 2, 2009): 411-412.-“The Pirate as „Every Man:‟ The Bounds of Manly Ambition During the Golden Age of Piracy.” Plan to submit in summer 2016.FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND AWARDS-Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organizationof American Historians, (2016), for Pirate Nests. Given to author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history.-John Ben Snow Book Prize, (2016) North American Conference on British Studies, for best book on any aspect of British studies before 1800.-John Lyman Book Award, (2016), Honorable Mention, U.S. Maritime History, The North American Society of Oceanic History.-Outstanding Faculty Award, UCSD Panhellenic Association (2016)-Distinguished Teaching Award,UC San Diego, 2015. One of five campus wide.-Robertand Laura Kyle Endowed Chair in Maritime History, San Diego Maritime Museum, 2014-2015.-Public Scholarship Award, UC San Diego Center for the Humanities, 2013-2015.-Faculty Career Development Grant, UC San Diego,2012-2013.-Center for the Humanities Research Group Grant, UC San Diego, 2012-2015(principle organizer).-Huntington Library MellonFellowship, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 2011.-Hellman Faculty Fellowship, UC San Diego, 2010-2011.-William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship, The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation selected by the American Society for Legal History, 2009.-Arthur H. Cole Award, Economic History Association, 2009.-The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Two Year NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship, Williamsburg, VA, 2008-2010.-Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Library Company, Philadelphia, PA, 2007-2008 (declined).-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship for research in American Legal History, Harvard University Law School, Summer 2006.-Donald Groves Fund, The American Numismatic Society, New York, NY, 2006.-W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 2003.-Artemas Ward Fellowship, Harvard University History Department, 2003.-Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2002. Used for yearlong research in English archives.-Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library: Providence, Rhode Island, 2002.-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund Dissertation Fellowshipfor research in American Legal History, Harvard University Law School, 2002.-Summer Travel Grant, Harvard University Program for the History of American Civilization, 2001 and 2002.-Summer Travel Grant, Harvard University Warren Center for American History, 2000, 2001, and 2002.PAPERSAND PRESENTATIONS2016 Fall“Pirates in the Archives,” UC San Diego Founders Symposium2016 Fall“The Development of Slave Cultures in Colonial America,” Lecture for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
32016 Summer“The Search For Justice in New Spain,”Moderator and Commentator,Conference on Sixteenth Century Studies, Bruges, Belgium.2016 Spring “Well-BehavedPirates Seldom Make History,” Interdisciplinary Seminar in Atlantic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, March 15, 2016.2016 Spring“Pirates or Navies? Murky Waters in the Early Modern Maritime World,” Global Maritime Histories Seminar sponsored by the Early Modern Studies Institute, USC and the Huntington Library, March 5, 2016.2016 Spring “Authority and Ethnohistory in the Mosquito Kingdom” Chair and Commentator, Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, Santa Fe, New Mexico.2016 Spring“The Rise of New World Slavery,” Lecture for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, May 9, 2016.2015 Fall“Jamestowne the Pirate Nest,” Jamestowne Society Quarterly Meeting2015 Winter“The Maritime World of the Early Stuarts” Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning2014 Fall"Europe and the Wider World: Introduction to Asia and America in the Making of Europe" part of roundtable seminar in honor of Professor John Marino2014 Fall“Pirate Science: The Role Pirates Played in the Birth of Modern Natural History” Scripps Institution of Oceanography CASPO Seminar (Climate, Atmospheric Sciences, Physical Oceanography)2014 Summer“The Maritime World of Elizabethan England” Osher Institute of LifelongLearning2014 Summer“Pirates Nests: The Rise of the British Empire: 1570-1740”San Diego Natural History Museum2014 Winter“Benjamin Franklin‟s War on Piracies,” UCLA-Clark LibraryEarly Modern Cosmopolitanisms Lecture Series2014 Winter“Pirates and Science,” San Diego Natural History Museum Public Lecture. (Also given separately to museum staff and board of directors).2014 Winter “Pirates: Unlikely Naturalists,” San Diego Natural History Museum media day.2014 Winter“Pirates in the Archives,” UCSD Alumni Association Event held at the San Diego Natural History Museum2014 Winter“The Revolutionary Atlantic,” Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning Three Part Lecture Series, San Diego.2014 Winter“Doing Publicly Engaged Scholarship” UCSD Center for the Humanities Roundtable.2014 Winter“TeachingPirates,” Muir College Honors Society2013 Fall“Early San Diego: On the Edge of Empires” (with Dana Velasco-Murillo), Geisel Library Keynote Public Lecture2013 Summer“Samuel Bellamy‟s Shipwreck: The Golden Age in Historical Context,” San Diego Natural History Museum.2013 Summer “The Golden Age of Piracy,” Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning Three Part Lecture Series, San Diego.2013 Spring“Pirates in the Archive,” Keynote address at UCSD Library Donors‟ Annual Dinner.2013 Spring “Teaching the Golden Age of Piracy at a Public University” San Diego Rotary Club.2013 Winter “Pirates in Print: Treasures of the Mandeville Special Collections” Geisel Library Keynote Public Lecture.2012 Summer“The „War on Pirates‟ and Pirates‟ New Role in the Atlantic Slave Trade” at the 6thInternational Congress of Maritime History, Ghent, Belgium.2012 SpringCommentator on panel entitled “The Politics of Privateering in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean” at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Annual Conference, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.2012 Winter“Teaching the Golden Age of Piracy” Keynote address at the “Commodore‟s Dinner,” San Diego Yacht Club.
42012 Winter“Piratical Societies: Writing about Pirates” Warren Honors Society.2012 Winter“The Influence of Atlantic World Studies on the History of the Mediterranean Sea,” UCSD Mediterranean Studies Roundtable.2011 Fall “Piracy and the Formalization of the First British Empire” Geisel Library Keynote Public Lecture.2011 FallCommentator on panel entitled “New Perspectives on Pirates and Piracy” at the The New Maritime History: A Conference in Honor of Roy Ritchie, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.2010 Fall“Boston Buccaneers: The Rise of the South Sea Pirates, 1676-1689,” at the American Origins Seminarsponsored by USC and the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.2010 FallCommentator on panel entitled: “Violence at Sea: Public and Private,” at Age of Sail, 1450-1850sponsored by the Omohundro Institute and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.2010 Spring“William Penn's Piratical Society: An Introduction,” at the Omohundro Institute Colloquium Series.2010 SpringCommentator on panel entitled: “From the Bottom Up: Sailors and Democracy,” at Organization of American Historians Conference, Washington D.C.2010 WinterCommentator on panel entitled: “Caribbean Empire and Identity before 1800” at the American Historical Association Conference and Conference on Latin American Historyin San Diego.2009 Fall“The Higginson Family Feud and the Rise of the Red Sea Pirates,”at The Seminarfor the History Department of Johns Hopkins University.2009 Spring“How Daniel Defoe and Cotton Mather Challenged the Image of Piracy,” Societyof Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Hamilton, Bermuda.2009 SpringServed on a three-person panel “From Graduate School to Tenure Track Job” sponsored by the early American dissertation group at Harvard University.2008 FallCommenter on panel entitled: “Pirates and Privateers after the „Golden Age,‟” New England Historical Association Fall Conference, Endicott College, Beverly, MA.2008 FallPresented dissertation at Omohundro Institute Roundtable. 2008 Summer “„Upon Feign‟d Trials:‟ Pirates Before the Bar in Newport, Rhode Island and Charles Town, South Carolina 1680-1700,” The Atlantic as a Theatre of War, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825, Harvard University. 2007 Spring“The Pirates of the Caribbean”Fourlectures of the Harvard Alumni Associations Alumni Education program cruise The History and Gardens of the Caribbean.2005 Spring“The Face of Piracy in Captain Charles Johnson‟s The General History of the Pyrates”Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, San Jose, California.2004 Fall“Piracy in the Anglophone World”Three lectures for Harvard Alumni Association‟s Alumni Education program cruise Treasures of the Atlantic Coast. 2003 Spring“Fiscal Heroes: Pirates and the Colonial Currency Crisis” International American Studies Association’s First World Congress, Leiden, The Netherlands. 2002 Fall“Metal and Empire: Piracy and the Colonial Currency Question” McNeil Center for Early American History, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.2002 Fall“Piracy and the Colonial Currency Question, 1670 to 1740”John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.TEACHING-UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, AssociateProfessor, History Department, 2007-Present.I teach HILD 2A, a 200 student lower level division lecture survey of early American history; HIGR 265, an early American graduate historiographycourse; HIUS 133 The Golden Age of Piracy,a 150 studentupper level division lecture course; HIUS 178/278 The Atlantic World1492-1800,
5an upper level division colloquium; HITO 178, A History of Seafaring in the Age of Sail, upper level colloquium sponsored by the UCSD Center for the Humanities taught with the San Diego Maritime Museum; HIUS 104, The Revolutionary Atlantic, upper level division lecture course; HITO 87, Freshman Seminar, The Law and Literature of Piracy in the United States During the Age of Sail; HITO 87, Freshman Seminar, Piracy in Popular Culture; HIGR 209(team taught with Rebecca Plant), Graduate Seminar, Historical Pedagogy;Numerous HIUS 199 one on one research courses; UCSD Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society Faculty Advisor (2012-Present); Helped the Honors Society publish The Chronicle, its first undergraduate history journal in May, 2013; Serve on numerous dissertation committees in history(U.S., Science, Europe), literature, and sociology. -THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY, Assistant Professor, History Department, 2008-2010. Taught The Golden Age of Piracyas an upper level seminar.-HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Lecturer, History and Literature Concentration, 2004-2007I taught a seminar entitled, The Anglophone World 1500-1800: A Cross Atlantic Discourse; a yearlong sophomore tutorial that compares British and American empires into the present;a freshman seminar entitled, The Golden Age of Piracy. I also taught one-on-one tutorials with juniors and seniors who specializedin the fields of America, Britain/America, and France/America.-SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY, Visiting Professor, History Department, Summer 2006.Taught a course entitled, The History of Boston: Heritage of a City.-SEA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, Guest Lecturer, Maritime Studies, Spring 2003Lectured on maritime studies at the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, campus and aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer, a 140-foot brigantine sailing vessel. Gave three lectures and served as a crewmember while cruising from Key West to Port Antonio, Jamaica.-HARVARD UNIVERSITY,Tutorand Teaching Fellow, History Department, 1999-2003Taught three semesters of sophomore tutorial for history majors that focusedon the writing and construction of history. Taught one semester of sophomore tutorial focused on American historiography. I was a teaching assistant for Professor Laurel Ulrich in Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary Americaas well as Women, Feminism, and History. I also taught the Survey in American History, Pre-1890. TEACHING AND MENTORING AWARDS-Distinguished Teaching Award,UC San Diego, 2015 (One of five, campus wide competition voted on by the UCSD Representative Assembly)-Graduate Student Faculty Mentorship Award, UC San Diego Graduate Student Association, 2013 (Campus wide competition voted on by graduate students in all fields including the School of Management and the Medical School)-Alan Heimert Teaching Prizefrom the Harvard University Committee on Degrees in History and Literature in 2007. I received aBok Center Teaching Awardfor every class I have taught as a Teaching Fellow and as a Lecturer at Harvard (five out of five), excluding tutorials that are not evaluated by students and are therefore not considered for this award. CURATORIAL WORK-Honorary Curator of the Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages, UCSD Special Collections Library.Responsible for selecting over $100,000 worth of manuscripts and rare books.-Curator for Pirates: Unlikely Naturalists,an exhibit at the San Diego Natural HistoryMuseum (2014)-Co-curator with Dana Velasco Murillo onrare book exhibit:Early San Diego: On the Edge of Empires(Fall 2013-Winter 2014)-Curator for Library Exhibit:Pirates in Print: Treasures of the Mandeville Collections.(Fall 2012-Winter 2013).Created online exhibit that grows monthly. -Faculty Advisor for Library Exhibit: Unburying Treasure: Pyrates at Geisel Library”(Fall 2011)
6FURTHER WORK AND RESEARCH EXPERIENCE-Co-convener with Kevin Macdonald forIllicit AtlanticWorlds, a two-day conferenceheld in January of 2015 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.-Lead organizer for aresearch group at UC San Diego funded by the Center for the Humanities entitled “Piracy and Transnational Mobility” that we hope will lead to a volume that I will introduce and edit.-My “Age of Sail” course and work with the Hill Collection was the focus of a UCTV documentaryHere be Pirates: The First Citizen Scientistshttp://www.uctv.tv/shows/28213-Academic advisor for children‟s book:Dirty Rotten Pirates (Octopus Publishing Group, London, U.K., 2014)and Pirates Ahoy!(Octopus Publishing Group, London, U.K., 2014)-I have given numerous media interviews on modern and historical piracy, somesyndicated globally.http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/12/us-pirates-virginia-idUSTRE76B4I120110712-One article was printed in the Somaliland Times, possibly read by actual pirates. http://www.somalilandtimes.net/sl/2011/496/41.shtml-Interviewed for “Arrrggg you Serious? How to Truly Talk Like a Pirate,” By Katy Steinmetz for Vocabularysection Time Magazine, September 18, 2013.-Interviewed forHampton Roads Daily Pressseries on piracy in Virginia on May 29, 2012, two articles on May 30, 2012, May 31, 2012, June 3, 2012,and August 9, 2013.-Interviewed for: “A Treasure Trove of Pirates Science” San Diego Union Tribune, March 26, 2014-Faculty Advisor for Phi Alpha Theta, the UCSD Honors Society (2012-Present); Helped them produce The Chronicle, the first undergraduate history journal in May of 2013.-Selection and organization committee for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Annual Conference, held at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA in June of 2012.-Selection and organizationcommittee for The Age of Sailconference held in Vancouver, Canada, October,2010.-Served on search and selection committee for National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellowships (2008-2010).-Presented a half-day seminar on piracyin early America in2006 for primary and middle school teachers at Primary Source, a nonprofit teacher-training program sponsored by a national grant.-Research assistant for Professor Jill Lepore on her book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan(2005).-Produced and organized The Next Turn in American Literary and Cultural Studies: A Conference in Honor of Sacvan Bercovitchin the spring of 2002.-Produced History of American Civilization Program‟s Annual Massey Lecture Serieswith E. L. Doctorow (2000), Maxine Hong Kingston (2000), and John Demos (2002).-Received Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences grant in the summer of 2000 to produce an extensive interactive web site for Professor Laurel Ulrich‟s course entitled Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary America. I gavenumerous lectures about using the web to teach 18thcentury history.-Research assistant for Professor Laurel Ulrich on her book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth(2001).-Research assistant for the Colorado State Historian at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver. Helped produce roadside kiosks during summer of 1996 including one about the history of Native American peoples outside of Boulder and one about the fruit industry in Delta County.
Mark G. Hanna
Mark G. Hanna
m1hanna@ucsd.edu
(858) 822-1532
9500 Gilman Dr
Department of History
Mail Code: 0104
La Jolla , California 92093
Curriculum Vitae News Courses Publications
CV [pdf]
Mark G. Hanna is associate professor of history whose work focuses on piracy, smuggling, and other illicit activities in early America and the British Empire. He is the founding Associate Director of the new Institute of Arts & Humanities, the Honorary Curator of the Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages in UC San Diego’s Special Collections Library, and the Robert and Laura Kyle Endowed Chair of Maritime History at the San Diego Maritime Museum. He has received a Distinguished Teaching Award by the UCSD Academic Senate and an Outstanding Professor Award from the UCSD Panhellenic Association.
His first book, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (UNC Press, 2015), analyzes the rise and subsequent fall of international piracy from the perspective of colonial hinterlands. The book explores the overt support of sea marauders in maritime communities from the inception of England's burgeoning empire in the 1570s to its administrative consolidation by the 1740s. Although traditionally depicted as swashbuckling adventurers on the high seas, pirates played a crucial role on land. Far from a hindrance to trade, their enterprises contributed to commercial development and to the economic infrastructure of port towns. Pirate Nests received the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, given to the author of the best first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history. This book also won the John Ben Snow Book Prize for best book on British Studies before 1800 from the North American Conference on British Studies as a well as the John Lyman Book Award, Honorable Mention, for U.S. Maritime History from The North American Society of Oceanic History.
Professor Hanna received his B.A. in history at Yale University (1996) and a doctorate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University (2006). He has been awarded numerous fellowships including a two-year residential National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He has received outside fellowships and funding from the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, the Harvard University Law School, a William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship from the American Society for Legal History, an Arthur H. Cole Grant from the Economic History Association. At UC San Diego he has received a Hellman award, a Public Scholarship Award, and the Graduate Faculty Mentor Award.
Courses
HIUS 133 "The Golden Age of Piracy" - upper level lecture course. (spring 2017)
HIUS 178/278 "The Atlantic World 1492-1803" - an upper level colloquium.
HILD 2A "The Survey of Early American History" - a lower division lecture course.
HIGR 209 "Teaching History" - a graduate seminar on historical pedagogy.
HIGR 265A "Historiography of Early America" - upper level course.
HITO 87 "Piracy in Popular Culture" - a freshman seminar.
HITO 178 "A History of Seafaring in the Age of Sail" - upper level colloquium (spring 2017). UCSD Produced a documentary about the course
HIUS 104 "The Revolutionary Atlantic" - an upper level lecture course (spring 2014).
Publications
QUOTED: "Many pirates eventually settled down to respectable lives. ... And pirates were very different in different time periods. The Johnny Depp portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow would only be valid for the very short time period of 1713 to 1730."
Shiver me timbers! History professor debunks myths about pirates at UCSD’s Geisel Library
UCSD History Professor Mark G. Hanna
UCSD History Professor Mark G. Hanna
Staff
By Will Bowen
“The image of pirates presented by writers, such as Robert Lewis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe, is false,” claims Stanley Wahlens, UCSD Extension Division advisor and pirate aficionado. “Pirates like William Kidd were actually agents of the British government with a license to plunder Spanish ships.” Wahlens, along with about 50 other individuals, mostly UCSD staff and faculty, came to listen to a scholarly and intriguing lecture by UCSD history professor Mark G. Hanna titled, “A Nest of Pirates: Piracy and the Formalization of the First British Empire,” held on Oct. 20 in the Seuss Room at the Geisel Library on campus.
The lecture was given in connection with the exhibit, “Unburying Treasure: Pyrates at Geisel,” which is located on the main floor of the library.
Marlayna Christensen, Outreach Librarian at Geisel, who helped curate the exhibit with Hanna said, “The exhibit features songbooks, videos, records, books and a rogues gallery of different pirates. It reveals everything you might want to know about pirate lifestyle and weaponry. It will be up through January 2012.”
Hanna, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, with a dissertation on the impact of pirates on Newport and Charlestown, Rhode Island from 1670-1730, said he was never particularly interested in pirates growing up and never planned to make the study of pirates his lifelong avocation.
His original interest was fatherhood in America, he explained, but as he was giving a talk on an American father named William Harris, who had been captured by pirates, he noticed the audience was most fascinated and had the most questions about the part of his paper on pirates. These questions led him to go back and redo his search of the records on pirates.
According to Hanna, fictional writers and Hollywood have given us a misleading picture of pirates as swashbuckling social outcasts, outlaws, and enemies of mankind who remained that way their entire lives. “Many pirates eventually settled down to respectable lives,” he said. “And pirates were very different in different time periods. The Johnny Depp portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow would only be valid for the very short time period of 1713 to 1730.”
Hanna found that many communities on the periphery of the English Empire supported pirates because pirates brought in money from the business of repairing and refitting their ships, and other resources, like slaves. English pirates captured the African slaves incarcerated on Spanish vessels destined for the Caribbean, and who were eventually brought to New England.
Pirate James Brown married the daughter of a deputy governor and was selected for political office in New England, while pirate Thomas Cromwell was welcomed by John Winter the governor of Boston as a “God’s Send.” Captain Henry Morgan, whose image is depicted on Morgan Rum bottles, was given permission to plunder the Spanish colonies and was eventually knighted. He later bought a plantation in Jamaica and ended up executing other pirates!
Some communities, like the Quakers in eastern Delaware, tolerated and protected pirates from prosecution because the Red Sea pirates attacked ships owned by Muslims — a religion the Quakers thought was a product of the Antichrist. The pirates who walked freely in their midst were also a guarantee against further religious persecution by the British Crown.
Hanna said historical documents reveal that when it comes to pirates, it’s difficult to sort fact from fiction, but generalizations about them are wrong; pirates have gotten a bad rap, and ended up as everyone’s scapegoat, be it for their anti-capitalist lifestyle or flamboyant clothing or aberrant sexual norms.
Geisel Library resources for those interested in pirates:
• Most important is the “
Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages,”
donated by Kenneth and Dorothy Hill in 1974. The Collection has more than 2,000 entries, including books from the 1600s and 1700s;
• such as Alexander Esqemeling’s
“Buccaneers of America,”
published in 1684,
• and Captain Charles Johnson’s
“A General History of the Pirates,”
published in 1725.
If you go
What:
‘Unburying Treasure: Pyrates at Geisel’
When:
7:30 a.m. to midnight. Mondays-Thursdays and Sundays; to 6 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays
Where:
Main floor of Geisel Library in the heart of campus near the Price Center.
Admission:
Free
Contact:
(858) 534-2533, (858) 822-0450
Copyright © 2017, La Jolla Light
QUOTED: "Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 is a valuable addition to a sparse literature on politics in this period."
"The text is overwhelmed by a massive number of digressive footnotes. … The fetish for overextensive footnoting, combined with some lapses in copyediting, mar what is a vigorously argued work that shines light into a period of American history that needs more attention."
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740
Trevor Burnard
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p143.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. By Mark G. Hanna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 448. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-1794-7.)
In a revealing anecdote that starts this ambitious investigation into the political role of pirates in shaping colonial British American society in the seventeenth century, Mark G. Hanna recalls that Bernard Bailyn asked him whether piracy explained the entire rise of British empire. Hanna cheekily responded that it did. Bailyn demurred. This book is an attempt to show that Bailyn was wrong. Does it succeed?
Hanna argues that wherever piracy flourished it was because landed communities had political reasons for hindering imperial attempts to define piracy as entirely criminal. Thus, Hanna sees pirates neither as marginal men detached from ordinary society nor as psychotic criminals. Rather, he sees land-based acceptance of pirate nests as part of colonial attempts to contest the terms of entry into the British empire. Hanna argues that if we are to understand the transformation of English America from 1688 to 1720, then we need to see support and opposition to piracy as part of an extended colonial debate about the terms by which private colonies entered the British empire. Although he covers piracy from Sir Francis Drake onward, Hanna emphasizes the little studied but vitally important years of the 1690s, years in which the position of the American colonies was especially parlous. He makes a convincing case that 1696 was a crucial year in convincing Britain to adopt a fierce antipiracy strategy, headed by Edward Randolph, surveyor general of customs in America and a key agent of imperial change. More to the point, the fierce disputes over piracy in the colonies in 1696 reveal, Hanna believes, alternative views of empire. One side--the side wanting to get rid of pirates and that followed the lead taken by Jamaica as early as 1688--accepted imperial integration as the price of colonial prosperity and efficiency. But other Americans, notably in nonroyal colonies, were more interested in the immediate economic and political benefits that having pirates in their midst brought to hard-pressed and contentious local societies. The first group won the battle, but the fight over how colonies should be organized within the empire was fierce. Hanna argues that tolerance for pirates was a crucial test of where colonists and colonies stood on the issue of imperial integration. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 is a valuable addition to a sparse literature on politics in this period.
The question is whether the political changes of the 1690s that Hanna correctly identifies as fundamental to shaping the eighteenth-century British empire can be attributed almost solely to the war on the pirates that began in that decade and lasted till the 1730s. Here, I think Hanna overstates his case. Bailyn is probably right in downplaying the role of the war on pirates. Hanna's problem is his treatment of Jamaica, a colony central to his claims and the focus of an important chapter. He believes, correctly, that what happened in Jamaica (the major center of piracy in English America in the 1670s) influenced what happened elsewhere. But his knowledge of Jamaica, based entirely, it seems, on sources held in official archives in London without any immersion into the records kept in the island, is hazy. In particular, he does not fully engage with the influential and convincing arguments of Nuala Zahedieh's The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660-1700 (New York, 2010) that piracy was an ideal start-up
trade for a burgeoning colony, bringing in valuable bullion that helped kick-start the plantation economy. Zahedieh also argues that piracy became a problematic activity once the plantation sector became a significant element in the business strategies of highly influential London merchant-elites. Her argument is based on deep archival research into both Jamaican and British archives. She shows that there were deep-seated social and economic changes occurring in Jamaica in the 1680s and 1690s that altered patterns of imperial trade and made the suppression of piracy an urgent and explainable task. By failing to engage with this argument, Hanna reduces what happened in Jamaica to differences of opinion between powerful political leaders. It was much more than that. And Jamaica's antipirate policies are, likewise, hard to explain purely by reference to what happened in the peripheries, excluding the metropolitan center.
A final word about footnotes. The text is overwhelmed by a massive number of digressive footnotes. They often contain material only marginally relevant to the text and are sometimes contradictory, as in note 39 on page 167, or repetitive. The fetish for overextensive footnoting, combined with some lapses in copyediting, mar what is a vigorously argued work that shines light into a period of American history that needs more attention.
Trevor Burnard
University of Melbourne
QUOTED: "Hanna's book is large, complicated and not always easy to read. He has trolled British and colonial archives assiduously, but he seems reluctant to leave out any information that he has found there. His footnotes are obese."
"In spite of these faults, the importance of the book is without doubt. By drawing out the wider economic and social significance of pirate activity in the English Atlantic world, Hanna has written the best contextual overview of piracy now in print."
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740
Paul Monod
Canadian Journal of History. 51.3 (Winter 2016): p573.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
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Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 by Mark G. Hanna. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. 2015. xvi, 448 pp. $45.00 US (cloth).
Can anything new be said about early modern piracy? After radical pirates, democratic pirates, women pirates, black pirates, gay pirates, Jacobite pirates and sea Jacobins; after the Pirate Wars and the War against the Pirates; after piracy as ideology and piracy as business; after malefactors like Henry Every, John Quelch, and Edward Teach alias Blackbeard have been hunted by researchers to the ends of the earth--after all this, is it possible to imagine a perspective that adds to our understanding of the phenomenon? Astonishingly, Mark Hanna has succeeded in that task with this remarkable book. By piling up a treasure-trove of archival information from Britain and its colonies, Hanna has written one of the most important works on piracy to appear in the last three decades.
Piracy has long been a fixture of Atlantic history. Pirates have been depicted as free-traders who violated imperial boundaries and flaunted the privileges of monopoly companies. Organized in self-governing, egalitarian and culturally diverse societies, they were initially perceived as useful allies in the competitive warfare between expanding European states, before being ruthlessly wiped out by the proponents of commercial order and centralized control. England encouraged Caribbean privateers in the sixteenth century, maritime pillagers who were no better than pirates in Spanish eyes. After 1696, however, the newly formed Board of Trade began a campaign of extermination against pirates like Captain Kidd, who were seen as causing disruption within the English empire.
Hanna accepts most of this familiar story, but he binds the phases of piracy tightly into the commercial formation of empire and clearly shows why it eventually had to be erased. He is acutely aware of the slippery definition of piracy, which could include everything from privateering to commercial interloping to illegal logging in Central America. Throughout the New World, English piracy went hand in hand with colonialism. The supporters of Francis Drake and his marauding colleagues in the late 1500s tried to wrest trade and land from the Spanish empire. In the early 1600s, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, invested in the Virginia Company while setting up "pirate nests" throughout the Caribbean. Decades later, Henry Morgan used the buccaneers to found a "piratical society" in Jamaica, before turning on his erstwhile friends in order to impose royalist control on the colony. Every Atlantic historian knows about Morgan's career, but Hanna places him as the last in a succession of well-born English pirates who constructed an empire in the islands through a combination of self-promotion, vigorous anti-Catholicism, brutality, and unvarnished thievery.
After Morgan, the narrative shifts north, to the mainland American colonies of England. The middle section of Hanna's book is less about robbery on the high seas than about its appeal to colonial societies that were bereft of specie and prevented from trading freely outside the English empire. Colonial towns and cities were lured by the attractions of piracy, which could bring infusions of gold, silver, and foreign goods into local economies. Respectable colonial merchants were seldom reluctant to provide funds for profitable pirate ventures. Former pirates could achieve high status in the colonies--one even married the daughter of a governor. Newport, Rhode Island, may have been the most notorious North American centre of piracy, but no port from Boston to Charlestown was innocent of piratical associations. As the English government gradually turned its judicial and maritime might against piracy, disgruntled colonial elites came to regard it as a safeguard of their liberty and independence. The creation after 1696 of colonial Admiralty courts, in which judgments on piracy were rendered by officials rather than juries, became emblematic to colonial merchants of the injustices of centralized imperial rule. Although the Board of Trade won the first phase of the struggle, Admiralty jurisdictions would continue to rankle in colonial minds until the Revolution.
The supposed "Golden Age" of piracy, from the War of the Spanish Succession to the late 1720s, is dealt with in a single chapter, as if it were an aftermath. Hanna regards the anti-hierarchical and culturally heterogeneous pirate mentality of this period as a reaction to the successful initiatives of imperial governments against piracy. The familiar anti-heroes of pirate lore, from Edward Low to Anne Bonny, Mary Read and Blackbeard himself, were doomed not by their wicked acts but by their lack of connection to wider social circles of colonial support--they were, indeed, "abandon'd wretches" (ch. 10). The symbiosis between piracy and empire had been ruptured, at least in the Atlantic world, and would never be reestablished.
Hanna's book is large, complicated and not always easy to read. He has trolled British and colonial archives assiduously, but he seems reluctant to leave out any information that he has found there. His footnotes are obese. He prefers not to break up long discursive chapters into shorter, more focused sections. As a result, by the final paragraph of each chapter, the reader feels exhausted and perhaps a little bewildered. The book's argument is found mainly in the introduction and conclusion; what lies between seems at times like a wide Sargasso Sea. Paradoxically, while downplaying its centrality, Hanna makes the "Golden Age" seem more interesting than what went before. In spite of these faults, the importance of the book is without doubt. By drawing out the wider economic and social significance of pirate activity in the English Atlantic world, Hanna has written the best contextual overview of piracy now in print.
DOI:10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Paul Monod, Middlebury College
QUOTED: "This fine work enriches and displays the maritime foundations of the British Empire."
"highly recommended."
Hanna, Mark G.: Pirate nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740
B.M. Gough
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1534.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Hanna, Mark G. Pirate nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. North Carolina, 2015. 448p index afp ISBN 9781469617947 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9781469617961 ebook, $44.99
53-4543
DA16
2015-22645 CIP
Many are the demonstrated explanations of the early development of the British Empire, and Hanna (Univ. of California, San Diego) adds another theory: piracy was one of the spurs to empire, an attractive idea in theory, but less easy to quantify. Trade was always the principal motivation, followed by colonization. War and territorial conquests enlarged the real estate of empire. Added to this was the predatory nature of English mariners, who in general chaotic circumstances more often than not outdid their rivals, afloat and ashore. Based on an impressive collection of documentary sources, many dealing with trade regulation and colonial affairs, this book is a powerful persuader of the theme advanced. This is also a book about colonial enclaves and the economic opportunities that benefited them. Hanna gives Barbados, Bermuda, Charleston, Rhode Island, and Jamaica their due, and, on occasion, personalities (William Dampier and Henry Morgan, among others) intrude and enliven the text. This work enlarges the understanding of piracy, a subject much in need of revamping. Piracy was good for business, and this fine work enriches and displays the maritime foundations of the British Empire. Illustrations, but no bibliography. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Graduate students/ faculty.--B. M. Gough, Wilfrid Laurier University
Gough, B.M.
QUOTED: "This is a must have book for your reference library. This book really destroys a lot of Hollywood pirate myths. ... A good read."
Pirate Nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740
Discussion in 'Book & Movie Review Tent' started by 2nd Dragoon, Oct 23, 2016.
2nd Dragoon
2nd Dragoon
Private
Joined:Oct 4, 2016
Messages:131
I know the title of this thread sounds odd and not American Civil War but this book and the information in it pertains to the importation of slaves to North America by pirates.
With the demise of pirates, those sea faring captains turned to the slave trade. PIRATES or PRIVATEERS played a pivotal roll in the importation of slaves to the new world. Something that Hollywood fails to mention in any of the movies about pirates.
This is a must have book for your reference library. This book really destroys a lot of Hollywood pirate myths in MHO. A good read!!! Well footnoted and the footnotes are just as interesting to read as well.
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 by Mark G Hanna
Analyzing the rise and subsequent fall of international piracy from the perspective of colonial hinterlands, Mark G. Hanna explores the often overt support of sea marauders in maritime communities from the inception of England's burgeoning empire in the 1570s to its administrative consolidation by the 1740s. Although traditionally depicted as swashbuckling adventurers on the high seas, pirates played a crucial role on land. Far from a hindrance to trade, their enterprises contributed to commercial development and to the economic infrastructure of port towns.
English piracy and unregulated privateering flourished in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean because of merchant elites' active support in the North American colonies. Sea marauders represented a real as well as a symbolic challenge to legal and commercial policies formulated by distant and ineffectual administrative bodies that undermined the financial prosperity and defense of the colonies. Departing from previous understandings of deep-sea marauding, this study reveals the full scope of pirates' activities in relation to the landed communities that they serviced and their impact on patterns of development that formed early America and the British Empire.
2nd Dragoon, Oct 23, 2016 #1
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740by Mark G.Hanna. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xvi,448 pp. $45.00 US (cloth).Can anything new be said about early modern piracy? After radical pirates,democratic pirates, women pirates, black pirates, gay pirates, Jacobitepirates and sea Jacobins; after the Pirate Wars and the War against thePirates; after piracy as ideology and piracy as business; after malefactorslike Henry Every, John Quelch, and Edward Teach alias Blackbeard havebeen hunted by researchers to the ends of the earth — after all this, is itpossible to imagine a perspective that adds to our understanding of thephenomenon? Astonishingly, Mark Hanna has succeeded in that taskwith this remarkable book. By piling up a treasure-trove of archival infor-mation from Britain and its colonies, Hanna has written one of the mostimportant works on piracy to appear in the last three decades.Piracy has long been a fixture of Atlantic history. Pirates have beendepicted as free-traders who violated imperial boundaries and flauntedthe privileges of monopoly companies. Organized in self-governing, egali-tarian and culturally diverse societies, they were initially perceived asCJH/ACH51.362016Comptes rendus573http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjh.ach.51.3.rev06 - Peter Devine
useful allies in the competitive warfare between expanding Europeanstates, before being ruthlessly wiped out by the proponents of commercialorder and centralized control. England encouraged Caribbean privateers inthe sixteenth century, maritime pillagers who were no better than piratesin Spanish eyes. After 1696, however, the newly formed Board of Tradebegan a campaign of extermination against pirates like Captain Kidd,who were seen as causing disruption within the English empire.Hanna accepts most of this familiar story, but he binds the phases ofpiracy tightly into the commercial formation of empire and clearly showswhy it eventually had to be erased. He is acutely aware of the slipperydefinition of piracy, which could include everything from privateering tocommercial interloping to illegal logging in Central America. Throughoutthe New World, English piracy went hand in hand with colonialism. Thesupporters of Francis Drake and his marauding colleagues in the late1500s tried to wrest trade and land from the Spanish empire. In the early1600s, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, invested in the Virginia Companywhile setting up ‘‘pirate nests’’ throughout the Caribbean. Decades later,Henry Morgan used the buccaneers to found a ‘‘piratical society’’ in Jamaica,before turning on his erstwhile friends in order to impose royalist controlon the colony. Every Atlantic historian knows about Morgan’s career, butHanna places him as the last in a succession of well-born English pirateswho constructed an empire in the islands through a combination of self-promotion, vigorous anti-Catholicism, brutality, and unvarnished thievery.After Morgan, the narrative shifts north, to the mainland Americancolonies of England. The middle section of Hanna’s book is less aboutrobbery on the high seas than about its appeal to colonial societies thatwere bereft of specie and prevented from trading freely outside the Englishempire. Colonial towns and cities were lured by the attractions of piracy,which could bring infusions of gold, silver, and foreign goods into localeconomies. Respectable colonial merchants were seldom reluctant to providefunds for profitable pirate ventures. Former pirates could achieve highstatus in the colonies — one even married the daughter of a governor.Newport, Rhode Island, may have been the most notorious North Americancentre of piracy, but no port from Boston to Charlestown was innocentof piratical associations. As the English government gradually turned itsjudicial and maritime might against piracy, disgruntled colonial elitescame to regard it as a safeguard of their liberty and independence. Thecreation after 1696 of colonial Admiralty courts, in which judgments onpiracy were rendered by officials rather than juries, became emblematic tocolonial merchants of the injustices of centralized imperial rule. Althoughthe Board of Trade won the first phase of the struggle, Admiralty jurisdic-tions would continue to rankle in colonial minds until the Revolution.CJH/ACH51.362016reviews574http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjh.ach.51.3.rev06 - Peter Devine
The supposed ‘‘Golden Age’’ of piracy, from the War of the SpanishSuccession to the late 1720s, is dealt with in a single chapter, as if it werean aftermath. Hanna regards the anti-hierarchical and culturally hetero-geneous pirate mentality of this period as a reaction to the successful initia-tives of imperial governments against piracy. The familiar anti-heroes ofpirate lore, from Edward Low to Anne Bonny, Mary Read and Blackbeardhimself, were doomed not by their wicked acts but by their lack of con-nection to wider social circles of colonial support — they were, indeed,‘‘abandon’d wretches’’ (ch. 10). The symbiosis between piracy and empirehad been ruptured, at least in the Atlantic world, and would never bereestablished.Hanna’s book is large, complicated and not always easy to read. He hastrolled British and colonial archives assiduously, but he seems reluctant toleave out any information that he has found there. His footnotes are obese.He prefers not to break up long discursive chapters into shorter, morefocused sections. As a result, by the final paragraph of each chapter,the reader feels exhausted and perhaps a little bewildered. The book’sargument is found mainly in the introduction and conclusion; what liesbetween seems at times like a wide Sargasso Sea. Paradoxically, whiledownplaying its centrality, Hanna makes the ‘‘Golden Age’’ seem moreinteresting than what went before. In spite of these faults, the importanceof the book is without doubt. By drawing out the wider economic andsocial significance of pirate activity in the English Atlantic world, Hannahas written the best contextual overview of piracy now in print.Paul Monod,Middlebury College
QUOTED: "Hanna uses literary sources to read eighteenth-century culture and values. And while social and cultural historians might express a measure of skepticism, literary scholars will appreciate his approach to print sources as useful guides to the general public’s sensibilities. Hanna’s focus on the cultural power of the press, rather than on naval power, is appropriate."
"Hanna’s main narrative is enriched by copious notes that will reward readers with a wealth of data, as well as entertaining and engrossing historiographical context. UNC Press has done readers a favor in providing footnotes, as this important component of the book would have been lost in endnotes. Lamentably, the book does not feature a bibliography, but at 450 pages, this is understandable."
Chet on Hanna, 'Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740' and McDonald, 'Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World'
Author:
Kevin P. McDonald
Reviewer:
Guy Chet
Mark G. Hanna. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Maps. 464 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-1794-7.Kevin P. McDonald. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. California World History Library Series. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 224 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-28290-2.
Reviewed by Guy Chet (University of North Texas)
Published on H-War (March, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
Peripheries and Center in Pirate Histories
Pirate histories are framed in one of two ways. Some are borderlands histories, highlighting the limits of state authority at the periphery, the strength of local institutions and power brokers, and the persistence of local political arrangements. Others are national histories that illustrate how piracy declined as national governments built up their power and legitimacy, extending their administrative control over peripheral territories and communities. The two books under review display both approaches. Both examine the culture of maritime and coastal borderlands, but while Kevin P. McDonald describes the opening and growth of a new maritime frontier, Mark G. Hanna analyzes the closing of a frontier.
In Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves, McDonald directs readers’ attention to connections between Britain’s imperial projects in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Echoing P. J. Marshall (The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 [2005]), he undermines the conventional division between the “First” and “Second” British Empires. He traces commercial, personal, and political ties between merchants and pirates (or merchant-pirates) in British America and the Indian Ocean, drawing up a global map of economic activity and personal and familial relationships. This map—stretching from New York to Madagascar to India—challenges the historiographical habit of separating the Old World from the New, and the Second British Empire from the First.
In the process, McDonald also undermines the conventional division between merchants and pirates. Commerce raiders emerge not as outlaws and renegades but as members of local communities, who shared the values and interests of their neighbors, associates, clients, and patrons. They served their neighbors through their trade, and in times of crisis, also through military service. Indeed, they volunteered their services to defend Jamaica, Tortuga, the Bahamas, and New Providence from Spanish and French fleets. That pirates practiced their trade in the open, and were neither shunned by respectable families nor pursued by local and imperial authorities, casts doubt on anti-piracy statutes (both provincial and imperial) as credible reflections of the legal beliefs and conduct of English subjects. Instead, it reveals that imperial trade laws enjoyed little legitimacy and virtually no command in peripheral localities. McDonald thus calls the official definition of pirates as “enemies of all mankind” a legal fiction. In doing so, he implies that it is also a historiographical fiction, in the sense that historians accept early modern fiction as historically credible, and rely on it to understand mercantile and political culture in the English Empire. In this respect, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves supports and reflects the work of legal historian Lauren Benton, whom McDonald credits as a mentor.
In examining the extension of American trade (including illegal trade and piracy) into the Indian Ocean, McDonald focuses on New York, which was the central hub of Indo-Atlantic trade. He ties the fortunes of New York’s leading families and the consumer tastes of New Yorkers to the illegal India trade. One of the interesting aspects of McDonald’s study is his portrayal of the English pirate nest in Madagascar not as a trading outpost or trading partner of New York merchants but as an extension of New York’s mercantile and social life. He reveals the inner workings of a fully operational, reliable, and timely communications network between New York and Madagascar—a mail system that sustained familial relationships and business ties and transactions across two oceans. Madagascar thus emerges as both a European colony and an American community.
McDonald succeeds in sketching a new geography of the British Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that extends—through Madagascar—to the Indian Ocean. He demonstrates that contemporary Englishmen’s horizons were broader than those of most historians of the British Atlantic. This is an eye-opening and enlightening contribution, which requires other scholars to reframe their histories and periodizations (including such concepts as “First” and “Second” British Empires). Yet McDonald’s conceptual framework—“the piracy/slave-trade nexus”—might perplex readers. It highlights the centrality of slavery and piracy in American colonial economies, and details the role of pirates and privateers in supplying the New World with African slaves. McDonald provides a compelling account of slaves’ experiences of life and labor, and of their ingenuities in carving out a measure of privacy and control over their lives within slavery. But it remains unclear why the slave trade is more critical to understanding piracy than trade in other pirated commodities (such as rice, grain, timber, fish, sugar, and tobacco).
McDonald concludes his monograph with the Atlantic still a lawless borderland, in which piracy’s status as an outlaw trade was a legal fiction. While he himself does not examine how this seventeenth-century legal fiction later became reality, he avers that by the mid-eighteenth century piracy was stamped out, as “the North Atlantic had been transformed by and large into an English pond” (p. 37).
Hanna shares a belief in piracy’s rapid demise, and dedicates Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire to the study of this remarkable transformation. He identifies Anglo-American pirate nests (communities that supported, sponsored, and protected pirates) and traces their transformation into pirate-hunting nests in the early eighteenth century. For Hanna, this transformation was produced by the rise of the British Empire—the extension of its jurisdiction and bureaucratic reach into imperial peripheries, and the consequent attachment of British provincials to the interests, values, and laws of the British state, rather than to those of their local communities.
Hanna constructed his monograph as two books rolled into one. The first five chapters chart the formation and functioning of piratical networks and markets in America, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean up to the 1690s. Hanna offers readers a ground-level view of the empire and its trade, presenting piracy as an endemic and central feature of provincial economies and polities. Like McDonald’s study, these five chapters are a story of local interests, beliefs, and allegiances, in which the flourishing pirate trade of the seventeenth century reflected a decentralized imperial state, one in which both state authority and piracy were vaguely defined.
The book’s last five chapters advance Hanna’s argument regarding revolutionary change in the empire—a consolidation of power in London, by which the empire’s center became the master of its varied provincial peripheries. As provincials reoriented themselves to London on the issue of piracy, they integrated themselves into a new imperial scheme promoted by the late Stuarts—a structured, hierarchical empire, governed from the center. This revolutionary transformation occasioned the transition from private commerce raiding (piracy) to state-sanctioned and state-directed privateering, which continued to thrive in the eighteenth century.
Hanna painstakingly examines the mechanics of what he calls a turn-of-the-century “imperial revolution”—a legal, jurisdictional, and administrative revolution that transformed a decentralized salutary-neglect empire into a modern state governed from the center by a government that wielded power credibly and legitimately in its peripheries. It was the presence of English pirate nests that had exposed the central government’s impotence in the New World. The campaign to eradicate piracy was the vehicle of the consequent “imperial revolution.”
Whereas other piracy scholars who subscribe to this thesis focus on the Royal Navy as the central agent of Britain’s anti-piracy campaign, Hanna argues that this campaign took place mostly on land. Imperial authorities (the Crown, Board of Trade, and Parliament) recognized that pirates owed their prosperity and immunity to the economic interests and constitutional and legal beliefs of British provincials. Britain’s anti-piracy campaign, therefore, was not a naval campaign against pirates at sea, but a legal, bureaucratic, and public-relations campaign for the hearts and minds of provincial merchants, consumers, and mariners.
In this campaign, Hanna identifies courts of law and print culture as the two major tools deployed by imperial authorities in London to penetrate the empire’s peripheries and convert hearts and minds. From the start, imperial reformers sought to skirt local custom and precedent, which accommodated violent seizure at sea, and instead applied parliamentary statutes and royal proclamations and instructions directly in piracy cases. To accomplish this, piracy cases were diligently removed from the jurisdiction of local juries, magistrates, and judges, who—as Hanna demonstrates in chapters 1-5—shielded pirates as a matter of course in the seventeenth century.
Imperial authorities buttressed this reform of the court system with a public-relations campaign designed to castigate and delegitimize pirates and their commercial and political associates. Hanna demonstrates that royal proclamations, court proceedings on pirate prosecutions, and harrowing accounts of piracies were published by an activist central government as part of a purposeful endeavor to change the public’s legal and ethical beliefs regarding freebooting. This included efforts to popularize the novel legal distinction between “pirate” and “privateer” (p. 240). Hanna holds that this campaign was crowned with success. Within twenty-five years, provincials came to repudiate their former commercial habits, ethics, and legal beliefs; they instead adopted the moral, legal, and constitutional framework articulated for public consumption in government publications. Rather than signs of frustrated governmental aspirations, Hanna sees in these publications a testament to the power of print culture in the eighteenth century.
Hanna uses literary sources to read eighteenth-century culture and values. And while social and cultural historians might express a measure of skepticism, literary scholars will appreciate his approach to print sources as useful guides to the general public’s sensibilities. Hanna’s focus on the cultural power of the press, rather than on naval power, is appropriate. It is inconceivable that the revolutionary transformation of hearts and minds that he describes could have been accomplished by force, across three thousand miles of oceanic expanses, in numerous and varied provincial peripheries, with few tools of coercion, and facing the combined forces of economic interest, local custom, and judicial precedent. The shift Hanna sees in British sentiments and beliefs was not produced by coercion but through cultural transmission. Peripheral communities in the British diaspora were reeducated by their government, rather than coerced into submission.
Although challenging accepted orthodoxy on piracy suppression at sea, Hanna’s broader thesis will find support among most piracy specialists (adherents of Marcus Rediker, Roy Ritchie, and David Starkey, to name the field’s leading lights). They share his understanding of a thoroughgoing transformation of the Atlantic, within a single generation (1690s to 1720s), from a wild violent frontier to a policed and pacified locus of imperial trade. Hanna will face resistance, however, from piracy specialists who hold that eighteenth-century Britons did not perceive a transformation—neither in maritime security nor in provincials’ commercial habits and legal beliefs regarding “armed commerce.” But his real challenge is to convince skeptics in other fields of scholarship on the British Empire.
Hanna’s formulation of successful state building on the broadest of scales is what makes his study so ambitious and, likely, controversial. It constructs a novel British imperial history that will strike many colonial and imperial scholars as unusual, given their longstanding understanding of entrenched localism in British communities. Such scholars as Bernard Bailyn, Linda Colley, Jack Greene, James Henretta, and John Phillip Reid highlight the persistent distance and dissonance between metropole and peripheries. They concede that a campaign by the metropole to consolidate power and reorient the peripheries (over piracy, among other issues) took place under late Stuarts. But where Hanna sees metropolitan success, Greene, Henretta, and others see frustration in the face of provincial commitment to preserve the status quo and enshrine “salutary neglect” as the empire’s governing structure and constitutional philosophy. As evidence, they can point to the government’s inability to curb or delegitimize violent and illicit trades like smuggling, wrecking, and trade with the enemy, all of which remained popular and respectable in local communities.
Hanna, by contrast, argues for an imperial revolution through which the metropole invaded and captured the peripheries, brought them into its orbit, and integrated them. Thus, a seventeenth-century imperial culture of legal and administrative pluralism was replaced with a culture of imperial uniformity in the early eighteenth century. Perhaps what explains this divergence are the literary and printed sources that Hanna deploys as evidence in the second half of his monograph. His critics would charge that he is overly attentive to sources and people that reflected legal beliefs in London. Hanna, for his part, ably defends his sources and his method. He describes an incremental jurisdictional conquest and ethical conversion of peripheral pirate nests—first in the southwest of England, nearer the seat of government, then in Ireland, and finally in American waters. He finds evidence of the central government’s budding successes in the fact that royal colonies reflected the policy preferences, ethical standards, and legal beliefs of the Crown. In private colonies, by contrast, governors, their staffs, and appointed magistrates reflected the preferences and sensibilities of local merchants and consumers. Although not all royal governors pursued the king’s policy preferences on piracy suppression (New York being a prime example), Hanna sees evidence that royal pressure and conditioning could and did produce results, even in the seventeenth century, during piracy’s golden age. In this way, London’s perspective on jurisdiction, law, the economy, and the national interest crowded out provincials’ local orientations, beliefs, allegiances, and habits.
Hanna’s main narrative is enriched by copious notes that will reward readers with a wealth of data, as well as entertaining and engrossing historiographical context. UNC Press has done readers a favor in providing footnotes, as this important component of the book would have been lost in endnotes. Lamentably, the book does not feature a bibliography, but at 450 pages, this is understandable.
McDonald and Hanna share a conviction that what happened at sea reflected the culture (or cultures) on land. Both approach the sea as an extension of ports, rather than viewing seafarers as a subculture unto itself, as do some piracy and maritime scholars. But while McDonald provides a snapshot of maritime borderlands, Hanna examines the process by which these borderlands were integrated into a national community, within the framework of a rising modern state. Perhaps they differ on this because Hanna’s monograph is Atlantic in scope, whereas McDonald’s is truly Indo-Atlantic. The disappearance of piracy in the Atlantic raises questions unique to this theater—when, how, why—because it was anomalous: while piracy persisted elsewhere around the globe, it disappeared in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. It is understandable therefore that disappearance is not as intriguing or pertinent a topic for McDonald as it is for Atlanticists like Hanna. McDonald’s pirates never did disappear, and their descendants are still on the job in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of Africa.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=45738
Citation: Guy Chet. Review of Hanna, Mark G., Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 and McDonald, Kevin P., Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. H-War, H-Net Reviews. March, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45738