131-035 Pirates and their Enemies

Note

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually 25 points of first year history, see Prerequisites.

Semester

Subject Description

This subject will investigate a very old phenomenon: maritime raiding, or 'piracy'. Students will look at a few defined areas and times: in particular, the Mediterranean during the high-periods of Christian-Muslim sea raiding, Elizabethan England, the Red Sea and the Atlantic. Students should complete the subject with the ability to address issues such as how different definitions of piracy have arisen; the social economic and political motivations underlying piracy; the relationship between pirates and other individual sea-raiders and the states; the personal social and sexual strategies that pirates adopted; and methods of stopping piracy, both by their victims and by state action. We will also examine the ways in which pirates have been presented in fiction and film and the uses to which popular culture has put the phenomenon of piracy.