The punishment of pirates : interpretation and institutional order in the early modern British empire / Matthew Norton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Norton, Matthew, 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Piracy--Prevention--Law and legislation--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Piracy.

Piracy--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Social change--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Social change.

Trials (Piracy)--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Trials (Piracy).

Piracy--Prevention--Law and legislation.

Great Britain.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Biography/History:

Matthew Norton is associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.

Summary:

"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."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: meanings and mass executions

Institutions as cultural systems

The transformations of empire

Vagueness and violence on the maritime periphery

The classification of pirates

Guns, gallows, and interpretive infrastructures

"Hung up in irons, to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others"

Ambiguity lost: temporality and fatalism on the edge of empire

Conclusion: pirates, adverbs, and institutions.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource, title from digital title page (De Gruyter Brill, viewed on April 29, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Norton, Matthew, 1976- Punishment of pirates.

ISBN:

9780226823102

0226823105

OCLC:

1350419632

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license