Charles Johnson's "General History of the Pyrates" and Global Commerce

NOEL CHEVALIER teaches English at Luther College at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. The author of several articles on pirates and pirate literature, he has also edited an edition of David Garrick and George Colman’s The Clandestine Marriage and, with Min Wild, coedited Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century (Bucknell University Press).

"Chevalier's new monograph on the General History is absolutely indispensable for anyone with any investment in Golden Age pirate studies. Clear-eyed and richly contextualized, this is the work we have all been waiting for on this most essential and least understood of source texts." - Manushag Powell (coauthor of British Pirates in Print and Performance) "A sophisticated analysis of one of the most important sources for the Golden Age of Piracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Historians as well as literary scholars will find much to discover in this well-written and illuminating study." - Arne Bialuschewski (author of Raiders and Natives: Cross-Cultural Relations in the Age of Buccaneers)

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceA Note on CitationsIntroduction: Monstrous Business1 A General History of General HistoryMonsters2 “Let Us Make a Hell of Our Own”: The Pirate as Monster3 The “Borders of the Possible”: General History, Commerce, and EmpireInterlude4 “Pirate Vices, Publick Benefits”: The Social Ethics of Piracy in the 1720sGreat Men5 Plutarch on the Spanish Main: Pirates and “Great Men”6 “Their Crimes conspir’d to make ’em Great”: Piracy and the Spectacle of LawConclusionAppendix: Editions of General History of the PyratesNotesBibliographyIndex