Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Captain Misson, Mary Read, Anne Bonney, Captain Avery, Captain Tew, Captain Rackham...

Pirates is a comprehensive history of the life and crimes of these and many other notorious 17th century pirates, detailing their philosophies and codes, voyages, battles, treasures, trials and bloody deaths. Here are the pioneers of liberty and autocracy whose charters from a blueprint for subsequent generations of thieves, gunslingers, assassins, revolutionaries, activists and hackers.

The pirate counter-culture, which has fired endless imaginations from Hollywood scriptwriters to literary outlaw William S Burroughs, is savagely revived in this factual, yet mythopoeic evocation of terrorism and sudden death across the ocean frontier.

First published in 1726, and over 600 pages in length, Pirates is a definitive document which not only illuminates a turbulent and formative period of world history, but is also vitally relevant today as a study of the roots of slavery, revolution and alternative governments.