Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates and Global Commerce - (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850) by Noel Chevalier

About the Book

Examining how Charles Johnson's 1724 bestseller General History of the Pyrates depicts figures like Blackbeard both as monsters and Great Men, Noel Chevalier explores how the work untangles the contradictions within a fiercely capitalist slave-trading Britain emerging as a colonial superpower, where ruthlessness and ambition were both feared and praised.

Book Synopsis

A bestseller upon its publication in 1724, Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates shaped public perceptions of piracy with its portraits of such legendary figures as Blackbeard, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and Bartholomew Roberts. Yet despite influencing everything from Treasure Island to Peter Pan, Johnson's book has yet to be taken seriously as a literary work in its own right.

This study explores how General History of the Pyrates was at the heart of early eighteenth-century British debates about commerce, colonialism, and law. Examining how pirates are depicted as both monsters and Great Men, Noel Chevalier untangles the contradictions within a Britain emerging as a colonial superpower, where ruthlessness and ambition were both feared and praised. Traveling the high seas to plunder treasure from foreign lands, pirates were not so different from the British capitalists who built fortunes from resource extraction, the plantation economy, and the transatlantic slave trade. Connecting the work to later books like Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera that satirized the era and its power-hungry prime minister Robert Walpole, Chevalier shows how the pirate became an iconic figure in 1720s Britain, a time of cold-hearted capitalism and rapacious colonial expansion.

Review Quotes

"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"

"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"

About the Author

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).