This young man has the admirable idealism and desire for a fair and just society which appears frequently in the young everywhere. In the case of this book, the 20-something son of a friend gifted me this book unexpectedly. The type of person who ends up here on Goodreads knows well the heartbreak of having a book recommended or, even worse, gifted upon oneself and then, well, loathing the book. Wilson is fixated on justifying the behavior of pederasts and while I can understand the point that he is trying to make by constantly returning to this topic, it is only loosely related to the subject matter at hand, pirates, and just gets monotonous after a time. I had first noticed this when I read his Temporary Autonomous Zone writings under the name Hakim Bey but at the time wrote it off. One gets the impression that he is using historical examples of pederasts as a means of legitimizing some personal feelings of his own. Sometimes the story drags, as is true with most historical texts, but my major complaint comes with Wilson's fixation on pederasty within the Moroccan culture. Wilson did a fantastic job of digging up as many primary and secondary sources possible from such non-literary societies as well as charting the progress made within those Islamic societies by European pirates and renagadoes who would turn "Turk", or convert to Islam, to escape slavery and achieve a position of stature. It shed some light on the ancient pirate states of North Africa- Algiers, Tunisia, Tripoli, and Sallee- which I had previously only known of in passing, particularly the Barbary Wars in Tripoli. Not one of the texts I've read on the subject even mentioned the possibility of intentionality and resistance, much less the notion of "Pirate Utopia." Thousands of conversions to the faith of the Other mean nothing centuries of resistance to European-Christian hegemony mean nothing. They are seen as insignificant particles swept away from the mainstream of history by a freakish eddy or swirl of exotic irrationality. The pirates were uneducated, poor and marginalized-and hence (it is assumed) they could of had no real ideas or intentions. History has tended to view the Renegadoes' story as meaningless, as a mere glitch in the smooth and inevitable progress of European culture toward world domination. On the one hand, we have society on the other hand, resistance. Those who are irrational enough to believe in religion (or revolution) as a reason for action in the world are "dangerous fanatics." Clearly not much has changed since the 1600's. In our modern consensus view, the moral right of killing and stealing (war and taxes) belongs only to the state even more specifically, to the rational, secular, corporate State. We are not used to looking at history from a terrorist's point of view, that is from the point of view of moral struggle and revolutionary expropriation. Just as the European Consensus of the 17th century denounced such conspiracy as treason and apostasy, so our modern media dismiss it is as "terrorism". Apportionment of blame between pirates and the people who were creating the market by buying their produce (on both sides of the Mediterranean, one must point out) left as an exercise in historical futility. I don't buy this implication of idealism myself, however real the oppression, since it seems the main bread-and-butter of piracy was not more glamorous booty, but ordinary men, women, and children kidnapped and sold into slavery (or held for ransom), people as produce. The author has way more enthusiasm for pirates than I do, somewhat anachronistically casting them as early resisters to European class structures, proto-democratic. The various quoted contemporary accounts were the best part. A brief account of early modern piracy in the Mediterranean and east Atlantic based out of the African/Islamic side, giving a good sense of how it worked through a discussion of the port city of Salé, which in the first half of the 1600s escaped, for a while, political domination from assorted surrounding, and taxing, Islamic state authorities, and hosted a kind of self-governing pirate guild. Interesting little book, possibly best as a pointer to further reading than an end in itself if one's main focus is history as such.
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