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A sociological investigation into maritime state power told through
an exploration of how the British Empire policed piracy. Early in
the seventeenth-century boom of seafaring, piracy allowed many
enterprising and lawless men to make fortunes on the high seas, due
in no small part to the lack of policing by the British crown. But
as the British empire grew from being a collection of far-flung
territories into a consolidated economic and political enterprise
dependent on long-distance trade, pirates increasingly became a
destabilizing threat. This development is traced by sociologist
Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, taking the reader on
an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of pirates in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Norton shows us that
eliminating this threat required an institutional shift: first
identifying and defining piracy, and then brutally policing it. The
Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for understanding
the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing, classifying, and
constructing institutional order by tracing the transformation of
piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity to a criminal
category with violently patrolled boundaries-ending with its
eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English Empire.
Replete with gun battles, executions, jailbreaks, and courtroom
dramas, Norton's book offers insights for social theorists,
political scientists, and historians alike.
A sociological investigation into maritime state power told through
an exploration of how the British Empire policed piracy. Â
Early in the seventeenth-century boom of seafaring, piracy allowed
many enterprising and lawless men to make fortunes on the high
seas, due in no small part to the lack of policing by the British
crown. But as the British empire grew from being a collection of
far-flung territories into a consolidated economic and political
enterprise dependent on long-distance trade, pirates increasingly
became a destabilizing threat. This development is traced by
sociologist Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, taking the
reader on an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of
pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Â Norton
shows us that eliminating this threat required an institutional
shift: first identifying and defining piracy, and then brutally
policing it. The Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for
understanding the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing,
classifying, and constructing institutional order by tracing the
transformation of piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity
to a criminal category with violently patrolled boundaries—ending
with its eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English
Empire. Replete with gun battles, executions, jailbreaks, and
courtroom dramas, Norton’s book offers insights for social
theorists, political scientists, and historians alike. Â
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