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Rebellion and Piracy: Radical Community at Sea Isabelle Reynolds Introduction: Pirates Need Love Too Conceptualizing piracy as active rebellion, rather than social revolution, creates a framework by which the piratical and purposeful creation of community can be contrasted with normative social structures and power relations. For the purposes of this paper, I define community as a space and/or group which is deliberately held in opposition to dominant society. These spaces are purposefully constructed differently than their normative counterparts. In the Golden Age especially, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were sensationalized for their refusal to align themselves with the society they left—not only because of their piracy, but also due to their identities and aesthetic presentation. The community-oriented nature of many European pirates and pirate crews, and the care that they exhibited for each other, flies in the face of European capitalism, patriarchy, and violent religious enforcement. Rabbi Pirate Samuel Palache fled, with 1200 other Jewish Spaniards, to Holland during the Spanish Inquisition. As he used piracy as a weapon against Spain, as well as a way to establish and protect his community from violence, he rebelled against the oppressive violence of the home that he fled. Mistress Ching exhibits similar ideals of radical community in the face of state violence. Her use of her authority to institutionalize consent and respect for women explicitly ties her piracy to a capacity to protect the women of her community in a way that would have been impossible, were she not a pirate. As pirates often hailed from violent states themselves, they of course absorbed and replicated the cultural values of those states, but their use of piracy to rebel against
