No longer treated as a frivolous topic, in recent years, there has been a marked upsurge in the number of historical studies on maritime piracy. Most new studies have focused on the historical antecedents of the hot spots of today's piracy around the globe. Stefan Eklöf Amirell's new book, Pirates of Empire, is a welcome addition to the serious scholarship on piracy in Southeast Asia during the high tide of colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author, who teaches at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is a leading authority on piracy in Southeast Asia and has written extensively on the subject.
This book is fundamentally a political history of piracy in which Eklöf Amirell explicates the crucial role that piracy played in the extension and legitimization of empire as well as the anti-imperialist critique of colonization. The title, Pirates of Empire, is meant to capture...
