Reviews

Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson, James Koehnline

narodnokolo's review against another edition

adventurous informative medium-paced

3.5

marcantel's review

3.0

This is an interesting book on a couple of levels. First, it concerns itself with the history of a largely ignored group: the Muslim "regenados," or European "defectors" from Christendom who joined the Barbary corsairs preying on European shipping in the Mediterranean and beyond. Wilson specifically focuses on the port city of Salé-Rabat, which is unique in that it was largely free from Ottoman rule. The second interesting thing about this book is that the historical record is almost non-existent. Wilson posits a number of conditional suppositions, building a theoretical history around them. That being said, the extant historical record is a fascinating one. Islamic scribes & scholars, European agents, escaped slaves, and Moorish pirates who returned to Europe left behind just enough textual evidence on which Wilson is able to build up a pastiche history, sewn together on a couple of theoretical points: that members of the laboring class were sufficiently disaffected by the Christian/Capitalist order in Europe that they looked upon Islam as an attractive alternative; that they also perceived piracy as a way of striking against that order; and that Salé-Rabat was in actuality a self-organized pirate utopia.

Wilson's revisionist history of Barbary pirates is less convincing than that made by Marcus Rediker or Peter Linebaugh, but it is still a fascinating glimpse at the Islamic pirates of the early 17th century.