This course explores the origins, development, and decline of privateering and piracy as systems of maritime predation by which groups of mariners, working for European states against their enemies in time of war, or independently in peacetime, preyed on shipping and ports in the Atlantic Basin during the peiord from the Atlantic voyages of Columbus to the Golden Age of piracy in the 1720s. The beginnings of maritime predation in the Mediterranean during an earlier period will be examined as necessary backgound to an emphasis on how the imperial expansion of some European states effectively create the conditions that spawned privateering and piracy after 1492 in the Atlantic basin.
Special attention will therefore be given to the maritime expansion of Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands. The overall approach in this course will be to see the rise of maritime predation as a very significant feature of the development of the Atlantic basin as a whole."
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