Avast! This Oklahoma State professor studies pirates

OSU Research Matters

The pirate held a central place among rogues who scandalized through the pages of crime literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pirates supplied ample material for tales of wild adventures in exotic locations. Beyond their luridly engaging exploits, the pirate figure appealed to writers and readers for intellectual reasons. The Americas, including the Caribbean, opened imaginative space for moral and political philosophers to reimagine the fundamentals of human nature, the origins of civil society, and the best models for governance. Literary pirates proved to be exceptionally suitable to consideration of these issues. By “turning to account,” or going rogue, literary pirates presented a kind of living experiment; their practice of exiting mainstream civil society and recreating alternative ones on their own terms allowed those who wrote about them to explore the fundamentals of human nature and the possibilities and limitations of civil organization at a time when these were pressing issues in Britain’s literary and philosophical circles. In this episode, Meghan Robinson speaks with Dr. Richard Frohock to learn more about the impact pirates had on 18th Century literature.