Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Piracy In A Contested Periphery: Incorporation And The Emergence Of The Modern World-System In The Colonial Atlantic Frontier, P. Nick Kardulias, Emily N. Butcher

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This article uses world-systems analysis to examine the role that pirates and privateers played in the competition between European core states in the Atlantic and Caribbean frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Piracy was an integral part of core-periphery interaction, as a force that nations could use against one another in the form of privateers, and as a reaction against increasing constraints on freedom of action by those same states, thus forming a semiperiphery. Although modern portrayals of pirates and privateers paint a distinct line between the two groups, historical records indicate that their actual status was rather fluid, …