Pirates, Guns, and Empires
December 6, 2018
Pirates have long captured our imaginations. From Captain Kidd to Long John Silver to Disney’s Jack Sparrow, the lives of pirates have been the source material for countless novels, films, and tales of derring-do. But what were pirates really like? Were they freedom-loving swashbucklers striking a blow against corrupt empires and exploitative labor relations? Or were they ruthless oppressors terrorizing those who could not defend themselves?
In the spring quarter of 2019, with the assistance of a course development fellowship from the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Prof. Scott Sowerby will be teaching the Department of History’s first-ever lecture course on the history of piracy. The course, which will be offered at the 200-level, will be titled “Pirates, Guns, and Empires.” Northwestern undergraduates will learn skills of historical analysis while surveying the lives of pirates in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The course will take a global perspective, moving from the buccaneers of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, to the wokou pirates of the China Seas, to the First Barbary War of 1801–1805, when the newly independent United States launched a naval assault on the Barbary corsairs at their home port in Tripoli.
Prof. Sowerby, an associate professor in the Department of History, specializes in the religious and military history of Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. He will be assisted by Youjia Li, a PhD student specializing in the history of gender and migration in Japan and China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She will serve as the course’s graduate co-developer. Prof. Sowerby comments, “I have been interested in the history of piracy for a while, and Youjia and I are delighted to be able to offer this course with the help of a Chabraja fellowship. Pirates have so much to teach us about the history of race, labor, and empire on the high seas. Hopefully, more than a few students will be hooked.”