The photograph of the pirate is immediately spectral and ubiquitous. It haunts the mind's eye of foreign criminal students, diplomats and statesmen curious about the battle on terror. It returns within the headlines of foreign newspapers as an premature ‘security threat’. It materializes at the such a lot provincial cinematic monitor and the main acclaimed works of fiction. It casts its shadow over the liquid spatiality of the web, the place cyber-activists, file-sharers and a wide a part of the worldwide adolescence are condemned as pirates, frequently embracing that definition with satisfaction instead of resentment. this day, the pirate continues to be a robust political icon, embodying instantaneously the continual nightmare of an anomic desert on the edge of civilization, and the myth of a potential anarchic freedom past the inflexible norms of the country and of the industry. And but, what are the origins of this chronic ‘pirate delusion’ within the Western political mind's eye? do we hint the old trajectory that has charged this ambiguous determine with the emotional, political and imaginary tensions that proceed to signify it? What will we research from the heritage of piracy and the ways that it intertwines with the heritage of imperialism and foreign exchange? Drawing on foreign legislation, political idea, and well known literature, The Pirate Myth deals an authoritative family tree of this immortal political and cultural icon, displaying that the historical past of piracy – the various ways that pirates were used, outlawed and suppressed by means of the foremost worldwide powers, but additionally fantasized, imagined and romanticised via pop culture – can shed unforeseen gentle at the varied different types of violence that stay on the foundation of our modern international order.