The Golden Age of Piracy

The Golden Age of Piracy refers to the era from the 1650s through the 1730s, when piracy played a major role in the history of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Historians commonly split this period into three phases. The first, the buccaneering period (roughly 1650–1680), involved Anglo-French sailors based in Jamaica, Martinique, and Tortuga raiding Spanish colonies and shipping in the Caribbean and from the eastern to western Pacific. The second, the Pirate Round (1690s), featured long voyages from Caribbean and North American ports to bases in places like Madagascar, where pirates targeted Muslim and East India Company vessels in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. The third, the post-Spanish Succession period (1715–1730), saw English sailors and privateers, left jobless after the War of the Spanish Succession, turn to piracy across the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, North American eastern seaboard, and West African coast. Some narrower definitions exclude the first or second periods, but most include at least part of the third. The popular image of pirates today largely stems from this Golden Age, though often inaccurately.

Several factors fueled piracy during this time: a rise in valuable cargo shipped across vast oceans, reduced European naval presence in certain regions, the training many sailors received in European navies (especially the British Royal Navy), and corrupt or weak colonial governments. Colonial powers frequently fought pirates, leading to notable battles and events.

The term "Golden Age of Piracy" first appeared in print in 1894, when English journalist George Powell, reviewing Charles Leslie’s *A New and Exact History of Jamaica*, wrote of "what appears to have been the golden age of piracy up to the last decade of the 17th century." Powell used the phrase only once. In 1897, historian John Fiske gave it a more systematic definition, stating that piracy thrived more in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than at any other time, with a golden age from about 1650 to about 1720. Fiske included Barbary corsairs and East Asian pirates, arguing that their activity did not weaken his claim that the buccaneer era was the Golden Age. Pirate historians in the first half of the 20th century occasionally used Fiske’s term but varied its dates. In 1951, Patrick Pringle offered the broadest definition, claiming the most flourishing era began in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century—directly contradicting Fiske, who denied that figures like Francis Drake were pirates.

From 1909 through the 1990s, historians generally narrowed the Golden Age’s scope. In 1924, Philip Gosse placed its height from 1680 to 1730. Douglas Botting, in his 1978 book *The Pirates*, defined it as lasting barely 30 years, from the late 17th century into the first quarter of the 18th. Frank Sherry followed this in 1986. In 1989, Professor Marcus Rediker limited it to 1716–1726. Angus Konstam, in 1998, set the era from 1700 to 1730. By 2005, Konstam retreated further, calling a 1690–1730 definition "generous" and concluding that the worst pirate excesses spanned only eight years, from 1714 to 1722, making even a "golden decade" questionable.

More recently, some historians have returned to a broader meaning. David Cordingly, in his 1994 work *Under the Black Flag*, defined the "great age of piracy" from the 1650s to about 1725, close to Fiske’s original. In 2004, Rediker proposed a complex definition: a golden age from roughly 1650 to 1730, divided into three generations—buccaneers (1650–1680), Indian Ocean pirates (1690s), and pirates of 1716–1726.

Piracy during this era grew out of conflicts over trade and colonization among rival European powers—Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France. Most pirates were of English, Welsh, Dutch, Irish, or French origin, many from poorer urban areas like London’s ports, seeking money and escape. Piracy offered power and quick riches.

Historians like Fiske mark the start of the Golden Age around 1650, when the end of the Wars of Religion let European countries resume building their colonial empires, which involved significant seaborne activity.