What’s the Difference Between a Pirate, a Privateer, and a Naval Officer? In the 1700s, Very Little

10/10/24 • 55 min

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The pirates that exist in our imagination are not just any pirates. Violent sea-raiding has occurred in most parts of the world throughout history, but our popular stereotype of pirates has been defined by one historical moment: the period from the 1660s to the 1730s, the so-called "golden age of piracy."

The Caribbean and American colonies of Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands—where piracy surged across these decades—are the main theater for buccaneering, but this is a global story. From London, Paris, and Amsterdam to Curaçao, Port Royal, Tortuga, and Charleston, from Ireland and the Mediterranean to Madagascar and India, from the Arabian Gulf to the Pacific Ocean.

Familiar characters like Drake, Morgan, Blackbeard, Bonny and Read, Henry Every, and Captain Kidd all feature here, but so too will the less well-known figures from the history of piracy, their crew-members, shipmates, and their confederates ashore; the men and women whose transatlantic lives were bound up with the rise and fall of piracy.

To explore this story is today’s guest, Richard Blakemore, author of “Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy.”

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To explore this story is today’s guest, Richard Blakemore, author of “Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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After Genghis Khan Conquered the Earth, Kublai Khan Conquered the Seas

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Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea?

Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world's largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.

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Next Episode

How Civil War Vets Continued Living Despite Being Double, Triple, or Even Quadruple Amputees

The Civil War wrought horrible devastation on its soldiers: Nearly 500,000 were wounded by bullets, shrapnel or sabers and bayonets. Medicine was still primited, and often a doctor could do little more than amputee an injured limb. As a result, thousands of veterans were left missing one to four limbs, yet still needed to attempt providing for their families despite few job prospects and even fewer resources available to the disable3d.

In this episode we will look at profiles of seven veterans―six soldiers and one physician―and how they coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives.
Today’s guest is Robert Hicks, author of “Wounded for Life.” We look at how these soldiers were shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital, and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma.

In particular we discuss:

Electrical treatments during the Civil War to revive damaged bodies -- part of the founding of American neurology by the physician S. Weir Mitchell
Phantom limb syndrome and how the veterans still suffered from these wounds decades after the war
The collective experiences of the veterans profiled in the book show how they dealt with common expectations after the injuries

How this story relates to today's war veterans

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