Introduction: Brought to book: reading about pirates / C.R. Pennell -- The pirate and the emperor: power and the law on the seas, 1450-1850 / Anne Pérotin-Dumon -- The geography of piracy: northern Morocco in the mid-nineteenth century / C.R. Pennell -- The origins and regulation of eighteenth-century British privateering / David J. Starkey -- Piracy and world history: an economic perspective on maritime predation / John L. Anderson -- Pirates and markets / David J. Starkey -- Corsairing as a commercial system: the edges of legitimate trade / Gonçal López Nadal -- The seaman as pirate: plunder and social banditry at sea / Marcus Rediker -- Outlaws at sea, 1660-1720: liberty, equality, and fraternity among the Caribbean freebooters / J.S. Bromley -- Black men under the black flag / Kenneth J. Kinkor -- The buccaneer community / B.R. Burg -- The practice of homosexuality among the pirates of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century China / Dian Murray -- Cheng I Sao in fact and fiction / Dian Murray -- Women and piracy in Ireland: from Gráinne O'Malley to Anne Bonny / John C. Appleby -- Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pirates / Marcus Rediker -- Women among the Uskoks of Senj: literary images and reality / Wendy Bracewell.