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

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.