Eras

The history of piracy as recorded in the European and Asian documentary record divides into a small number of eras, each with its own geography, economic logic, and political sponsors. The buccaneering era of the seventeenth century centred on the Caribbean and the Spanish silver economy; its commanders carried English, French, and Dutch privateer commissions and operated more like irregular naval auxiliaries than like the freebooters of later legend. The Golden Age of Piracy from the 1690s to roughly 1730 is the period most readers picture when they hear the word: black flags, articles of agreement, voted captains, and the brief operational independence of crews that owed nothing to colonial government. The post-Golden-Age century from 1730 to about 1830 is the long afterlife of organised piracy — the Cantonese pirate confederations of the South China Sea, the Lafitte enterprise on the Gulf of Mexico, the Barbary corsairs of the Mediterranean — ending with the suppression of the last major regional operations.

Era assignments here follow the documented bulk of a pirate’s career rather than their birth year, and pirates whose work straddles two eras (Henry Morgan’s late career touching the early Golden Age, for example) appear in the era in which the most consequential operations occurred.