ÉTUDES ANGLOPHONES  ·  SOCIÉTÉS ET HUMANITÉS
The Wretched of the Sea
MA Thesis  ·  History and Civilization

The Wretched
of the Sea

The case for historiophoty as reception-history in Black Sails (2014–2017)

AuthorEleni Belmehdi
SupervisorAllan Potofsky
InstitutionUniversité Paris Cité
Year2025–2026

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

There were times that I was persuaded to sue for peace since then, but that was the day that on some level I knew. That England was broken… and that sooner or later a good man must resist it.

— James Flint, Black Sails XXVIII
Abstract Open →
Acknowledgements Open →
§

Introduction

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Part One
Historical and Methodological Foundations
I
Chapter I

Guerilla Historiography: Beyond Classrooms and Journals

1.1  Seize the means of education!
1.2  Towards a theory of critical reception of early America
1.3  History need not be done on the page
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II
Chapter II

Hostis Humani Generis

2.1  Mapping the Outlaw
2.2  The Motley Crew
2.3  A Republic of Pirates
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III
Chapter III

The Ship of State: Politics of Pirate Narratives

3.1  Truth convenient to none: fact and fiction
3.2  A floating fragment of land
3.3  Recovering the pirate: from imperial boyhood to Marxist rejoinder
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Part Two
Black Sails as Historiophoty
IV
Chapter IV

Of Monsters and Men

4.1  Breaking the frame: sociocultural context
4.2  The stuff of nightmares: the Pirate as the Monster
4.3  Civilization is coming: Empire as the Monster
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V
Chapter V

Dare To Struggle

5.1  Reform or Revolution
5.2  Too many goddamn men: gender, race, false consciousness
5.3  We are many, they are few: collective consciousness
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VI
Chapter VI

No Happy Plantations

6.1  Until some of us are safe: the problem of race
6.2  Bring it all down: Flint’s arc as race treason
6.3  The landscape after cruelty: revolutionary optimism
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Conclusion: The Stories that Survive Open →
Appendix I — Principal Characters Open →
Appendix II — Narrative Overview of Black Sails Open →
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Main Corpus

Black Sails (2014–2017) [television series]. Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine. Starz.

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Johnson, C. (2010 [1724]) A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. Lyons Press.

Stevenson, R.L. (1883) Treasure Island. Penguin Classics.

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‘A Look Inside’ (2015) in Black Sails: The Complete First Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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‘Blackbeard: An 18th Century Pirate’ (2016) in Black Sails: The Complete Third Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

‘Building the Behemoth’ (2015) in Black Sails: The Complete First Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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‘Dress to Kill’ (2015) in Black Sails: The Complete First Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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‘History’s Influence’ (2015) in Black Sails: The Complete Second Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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‘Inside the World of Black Sails’ (2016) in Black Sails: The Complete Third Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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‘Pirate Camp’ (2015) in Black Sails: The Complete First Season. Starz/Anchor Bay Entertainment.

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Introduction

Introduction

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history.

—Jack Rackham in Black Sails, XXXVIII.

In 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson published a boys’ adventure novel that would not only become one of the classics of the genre (Gubar 2009: 69) but also enshrine enduring pirate tropes and iconography such as the peg leg and the parrot on the captain’s shoulder into the common imaginary (Cordingly 1995: 7). Treasure Island follows boy-hero Jim Hawkins in his quest for the treasure of the infamous Captain Flint, buried on a deserted island. Jim has a treasure map obtained from Billy Bones, one of Flint’s former crewmates; he is accompanied and eventually betrayed by Flint’s old quartermaster Long John Silver. The novel would eventually “[infiltrate] the canon of books that every child is supposed to have read” (Furnas 1951: 199) and maintain its appeal through time for readers of all ages (Ward 1975: 305). It has been adapted on screen more than fifty times, including a Muppets movie (1996) and a Disney-produced science fiction retelling (Treasure Planet, 2002). Beyond direct adaptation, the mythology of Treasure Island extends to a robust number of prequels, sequels, and peripheral stories set in the same universe. 

One such reimagining is the television series Black Sails, which aired on the U.S. cable network Starz from January 2014 to April 2017 for a 4-season, 38-episode run. Created by the duo Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, Black Sails is set in the West Indies approximately two decades before the events of Treasure Island, while also incorporating several ‘real-life’ pirates and dramatized versions of actual historical events. In the first season, Flint’s crew are on the hunt for the Spanish galleon Urca de Lima which transports a treasure we are meant to understand will eventually find its way into a wooden chest buried on Skeleton Island waiting for Jim Hawkins. Black Sails aims to deconstruct the popular figure of the pirate and recontextualize it not ‘just’ historically but also politically. By the end of season 2, Flint has morphed from a quasi-mythical archetype to a fully fleshed character with an intriguing backstory: the dreaded pirate captain used to be an officer in the British Royal Navy. Disgraced for both his implication in a failed radical project to pardon the pirates of Nassau and his homosexual affair with the architect of said project Lord Thomas Hamilton, he escaped to the Caribbean and turned to piracy. Personally wounded and discarded by his own country, Flint now seeks revenge against England. Seasons 3 and 4 anchor the narrative in the fall of the Republic of Pirates and the end of the Golden Age of piracy: Flint and his crew are at the center of the struggle for the control of New Providence Island against colonial administrator (and eventual Governor of the Bahamas) Woodes Rogers. When Flint makes it to Skeleton Island with his treasure chest, his individualistic thirst for retribution has long since evolved into political consciousness and an explicit collective revolutionary project. Most viewers know the end of the story before they even press play on the very first episode because they have read Treasure Island and because they have at least a vague knowledge of the history of the British Empire: Flint will die, and so will his dream of a free proto-socialist Nassau.   

Despite overall positive critical reviews and eventually acquiring a niche cult following, Black Sails never reached the commercial success of contemporary pay-television series such as Game of Thrones (2012-2019). Most people, when asked about piracy on screen, probably think of Captain Jack Sparrow of the Disney movie franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. Yet the show is particularly interesting as an object of study when it comes to the reception of eighteenth-century Atlantic history, perhaps specifically because of what can account for its lack of mainstream appeal: it is explicitly, unapologetically political. Black Sails is fiction, but it captures a historical reality—a moment of disruption, a revolution in the strictest sense: what historian Amedeo Policante identifies as the transformation of the ocean from a site of absolute freedom into the “first embodiment of the world market” (Policante, 2015: 73).

In “Long John Silver, Karl Marx and the Ship of State”, Loraine Fletcher (2007) argues that very little scholarly attention has been given to Stevenson’s Treasure Island as a political text. She recontextualizes it as both a ‘product of its time’, evidently imbued with the socio-political concerns of Victorian England, but also specifically as intentional, active political commentary—a “rejoinder to Marx’s political philosophy” (Fletcher, 2007: 34). I argue that if Treasure Island is a novel that opposes Marxist internationalism, Black Sails, in turn, reasserts an internationalist commitment not just per se, but specifically as a response to and in dialogue with colonial pirate literature and Treasure Island in particular, which was itself produced in specific historical and ideological circumstances. I build on Fletcher’s analysis to posit that just like Stevenson, Steinberg and Levine utilize the historical setting of the Golden Age to make a political argument on two levels that are dialectically linked: the history that is being represented on the page/on screen, and the moment in which the story is being written/filmed. The relationship between these two levels is not one of analogy or reflection; the present does not simply ‘resemble’ the past, as though history were prone to repeating itself: the present was produced by this past. Atlantic capitalism, the racial order of the plantation complex, and the suppression of collective alternatives have resulted in ongoing structures which continue to organize the world in which Steinberg and Levine created this show. When Black Sails makes arguments about 1715, it is simultaneously making arguments about 2014—not because the two moments mirror each other but because one made the other possible.

The show was produced in documented engagement with the historiography of the eighteenth century Atlantic: Benerson Little, credited as historical consultant on the production, is a prolific popular history writer whose published works on piracy draw on the scholarship of maritime historian Marcus Rediker. The cast and crew’s public statements in the show’s supplemental materials confirm that the engagement runs deeper than surface period detail. Steinberg articulates the show’s historiographical ambition directly: “a lot of people’s understanding of what pirates are is from a story told at their expense. It’s not told from a subjective point of view of what it must have been to be those people” (Bonus Features, S1). This is the project of ‘history from below’ stated as a creative premise. Black Sails, this thesis argues, identifies the Golden Age of piracy and specifically the fall of the Republic of Pirates as a key moment in the establishment of capitalism, and the show is a class-conscious, radical historical commentary of that moment and process. 

Using the show as my central case study, I aim to outline a potential methodology for historians engaging with modern popular interpretations of early America. I have approached Black Sails as a text through the lens of Marxist literary criticism, particularly as outlined by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981); which is to say, a reading of the work (literary in its most extensive sense here to include screenplay and film) not just as reflective of its contemporary culture (superstructure) and mode of production (base) but as containing within itself the seeds that undermine it—reflective instead of the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of its time. Beyond a new historicist approach that reads the text as ‘contaminated’ by the context it was produced in, and with a real analytical commitment to dialectics, I am interested in a reading that unseals not just the text but the space in which the text is produced: a simplistic pseudo-Gramscian approach sees the cultural production only as a tool of maintenance of the base and thus a reflection of the dominant ideology, but historical materialism posits history as driven and defined by struggle. Artists try to emancipate themselves through their work—with varying degrees of success and through varying degrees of consciousness; artwork is not just determined by its context but also breaking away from it. My analysis is also heavily indebted to Cedric Robinson’s work in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007) and his treatment of film as a central site of struggle in the establishment and maintenance of the American racial regime.

In order to answer the question of how to approach a work like Black Sails as a historian, I borrow from Robert Rosenstone and Hayden White to tackle the question of historiophoty, “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse” (White, 1988: 1193). If the written production of the historian is “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (White, 1973: 3), it follows that filmic discourse that represents history can also fulfil the same purpose. My work is in line with Rosenstone’s assertion that “all history, including written history, is a construction, not a reflection. [...] That language itself is only a convention for doing history—one that privileges certain elements: fact, analysis, linearity” and thus that “history need not be done on the page. It can be a mode of thinking that utilizes elements other than the written word: sound, vision, feeling, montage” (Rosenstone 1995: 11). As White elaborates, “[e]very written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation” (1988: 1194). The discursive mode of visual representation of historical events, agents, and processes being quite different from that used for their representation in verbal discourse, conceptualizing historiophoty in its own right opens the discussion to an engagement with imagistic material beyond simple ‘illustration’ of the predications made in written discourse .

The historiographical foundation this thesis deploys is drawn from the New Social History of the Atlantic world, and specifically from the strand of that tradition most concerned with recovering the voices and experiences of those at the bottom of the Atlantic order. Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987) and Villains of All Nations (2004) are the central texts: together they reconstruct Atlantic piracy as a form of proletarian resistance, the pirates of Nassau as men and women who were shaped by the violent labor conditions of the Atlantic economy and who built a demonstrable alternative to it. Peter Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra (2000) extends this argument to the broader Atlantic working class—the sailors, slaves, indentured servants, and dispossessed commoners whose cross-racial solidarity constituted the revolutionary threat the colonial order spent the eighteenth century dismantling. Amedeo Policante’s The Pirate Myth (2015) approaches the same terrain from a different angle, tracing the legal and ideological genealogy of the pirate designation—the construction of hostis humani generis as a category placed certain bodies outside the protections of law and made the violence deployed against them appear as administration rather than politics. This thesis reads Black Sails against this body of work, treating them not as background context but as the scholarly standard against which the show’s historiographical arguments are evaluated.

The existing scholarly literature on Black Sails is modest in volume and, with one partial exception, operates outside the Atlantic historiography this thesis mobilizes. The dominant strand is queer theory and representation studies: Walker (2018), Răzman (2020), Schneider (2019), and Carcas (2019) all read the show primarily through the lens of LGBTQ+ identity and visibility, yielding genuine insights into the show’s formal treatment of queer relationships while leaving the political and historical argument largely unexamined. Friedrich’s doctoral thesis (2021) situates Black Sails within a tradition of morally complex television protagonists, reading Flint through the lens of “evil hero” typology—an approach that illuminates the show’s relationship to prestige television conventions without engaging with its historical content. Myrvang’s (2018) comparative study of Silver in Treasure Island and Black Sails is similarly focused on character and adaptation rather than historiography. Dirksen (2019) and Paige (2023) are the most politically alert readings outside this thesis: Dirksen reads Black Sails and Assassin’s Creed IV together through the lens of marginal identities and utopia, while Paige offers a sophisticated feminist legal reading of the show. Both stop short of the historiographical evaluation this thesis undertakes. The partial exception is Swaminathan’s chapter in The Cinematic Eighteenth Century (2018), which situates Black Sails within a broader argument about screen representations of the eighteenth century as a form of public pedagogy—the closest existing work to the historiophoty framework this thesis deploys, though without sustained engagement with the Atlantic scholarship or the show’s specific political arguments. Min-Chi Chen’s (2024) recent work on monstrosity in Black Sails is thematically adjacent to the analytical argument this thesis engages in in its fourth chapter, but it reads it through monster studies rather than through the political history of the figure of the pirate. Jones’s “Black Sails as Philosophy” (2020) is the only piece that engages directly with the show’s political content, but does so through social contract theory rather than through Marxist historiography, producing conclusions that are liberal rather than radical and that leave the class and race dimensions of the show’s argument largely unaddressed. 

The central question this thesis poses is whether a work of commercial prestige television can make legitimate historiographical arguments about the Atlantic past, and what reading it as historiophoty, as an intervention in the ongoing reception of that history, reveals both about the show’s political content and about the practice of history itself.

The thesis proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 establishes the methodological and theoretical foundations. It argues for the study of popular reception as a problem internal to early American history rather than a supplement to it and proposes critical reception theory (adapted from its development in Classical Studies) as the framework for this analysis, and establishes historiophoty as the evaluative tool through which Black Sails is read as a work of historical practice rather than mere entertainment. Chapter 2 establishes the historical and historiographical context: the Atlantic world of the early eighteenth century, the Treaty of Utrecht as a turning point in the consolidation of Atlantic capitalism, and the Republic of Pirates as a documented historical experiment in collective self-governance. Chapter 3 turns to the politics of pirate narratives, tracing the ideological function of the pirate figure from Johnson’s 1724 General History of the Pyrates through Treasure Island, establishing Black Sails as a conscious intervention in this tradition. 

Chapter 4 opens the analytical section with the show's most foundational argument: that the monster narrative deployed against pirates is an ideological operation, and that Black Sails systematically ‘unnaturalizes’ imperial violence by making its structural logic legible as violence, recontextualizing the pirates as operating within a framework of self-defense. Chapter 5 examines the development of collective consciousness across character arcs, reading what literary analysis would call ‘character development’ as the dramatization of a historical and political process, an illustration of consciousness growing out of material conditions and struggle. Chapter 6 addresses race as the primary contradiction within the revolutionary project the show builds, and the show’s sustained commitment to Gramscian pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. 

Every point Black Sails makes about the history it represents can be evaluated through and linked back to the work of specific scholars, most often historians. By explicitating these relations, I am presenting the show as a case study of Rosenstone’s argument that the practice of history the way professional historians engage in it, is possible on the screen. I argue that the show does not simply establish its own ideological foundations, it has something to say about the historical processes of the system it criticizes. It identifies the moment in time where things could have gone the other way. This is a deeply historiographical practice. 

The revolutionary optimism this thesis identifies in the show finds its most precise theoretical articulation in Ernst Bloch’s concept of “docta spes”—educated hope, the refusal to mistake historical defeat for structural impossibility (1986)—and in Walter Benjamin’s argument for recovering past moments of resistance from the narrative of inevitable progress (1968). Neither framework is applied systematically in what follows; but they are named here because they describe, more precisely than any other theoretical vocabulary available, what Black Sails is ultimately doing as a work of art.

The final product of this thesis takes the shape of a website within which the scenes I analyze are embedded. The reason for this is twofold: certainly, ease of access to my corpus makes this format most ideal, but most importantly, it reflects the very process of receiving and processing Black Sails that I explore in my thesis. This is a practical application of my core argument: that film media, constrained as it may be by its own limitations, does a type of history that the written word cannot do—and so the Black Sails video extracts I have incorporated within the text serve a purpose that my own written word alone cannot perform.

Part One  ·  Chapter I
Chapter I

Guerilla Historiography: Beyond Classrooms and Journals

I would try to make each child […] know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.

— James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers (1963)
1.1  Seize the means of education!

Black Sails is not a history textbook. It is something more ambitious: a television series that teaches the history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to audiences who will never read Marcus Rediker and other historians of the revolutionary Atlantic, and does so with an explicit political argument about what that history means. That it does this at all places it within a field of struggle that extends well beyond the academy; one in which the question of what gets taught about the past, by whom, and to what end has proven capable of generating crises that spill into legislatures, courtrooms, and the streets. Popular historical narratives always have an element of political instruction to them; what a society knows and learns about its past(s) shapes what it understands to be possible, legitimate, or inevitable in its present. The question of who controls the transmission and circulation of that knowledge—through what institutions, in what forms, for which publics—is tied to larger preoccupations about power and social change. History is, as historian Douglas Greenberg puts it, “public property”: unlike physics or chemistry, it “speaks directly to [people’s] identity and sense of nationhood,” and many “regard the national past” as a “possession not to be tampered with by scholars” (Greenberg, 1998: 301). The controversies examined in this section make this contention visible: beneath the surface-level disputes about factual accuracy or representational fairness, they are fights over political pedagogy—over who has the authority to tell a society the story of itself, and to what end.

In 1994, the publication of the National Standards for United States History sparked a wave of outrage. Characterized as “deeply biased, anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-white male, the very embodiment of political correctness in full flower” (Bahmueller, 1996) and attacked by lawmakers in Congress, the standards offered guidelines for the development of fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade curricula—the first ever set of national educational standards for teaching American and world history. Similar phenomena can also be observed across the Atlantic: the French loi n° 2005-158 du 23 février 2005, for example, imposed on high school teachers a requirement to teach the “positive values” of colonialism—a provision repealed by President Chirac the following year after a broad coalition of historians, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Benjamin Stora, publicly condemned it as historical revisionism (Bancel and Blanchard, 2024). Chirac’s response was itself revealing: “it is not for the law to write history”. The implication, of course, is that someone else will.

Popular media, public institutions, and the built environment have proven no less contested terrains. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), a popular history work of entertainment about the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the American Revolution whose reception almost immediately outran its entertainment function, generated enormous enthusiasm and enormous critical scrutiny in roughly equal measure. Lyra Monteiro, writing in The Public Historian, argued that the musical’s celebrated raceblind casting paradoxically erased the actual historical presence of Black Americans from the Revolutionary era, participating in what she identified as the broader phenomenon of “founders chic”—the recurring popular appetite for humanized, heroic portrayals of the Founding Fathers that has long structured American public history (Monteiro, 2016). That a Broadway musical prompted sustained engagement from professional historians (including a formal roundup of responses in the same journal) is itself evidence of the stakes at play.

When the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum planned an exhibit marking the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the result was a prolonged public battle that forced the cancellation of the exhibit and the resignation of the museum’s director; the controversy became the subject of a collection of essays by eight prominent historians, who used it as an occasion to examine what they called America’s “history wars” (Greenberg, 1998: 304; Linenthal and Engelhardt, 1996). In 2025, MONUMENTS1October 2025 – May 2026; co-curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker., a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and The Brick in Los Angeles, brought together ten decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside newly commissioned works by contemporary artists, posing what co-curator Hamza Walker described as questions about “who we want to be as a nation, and who and what is worth remembering, let alone celebrating”. The exhibition framed its scope explicitly: “from 1619 to yesterday”. The monuments debate it engaged—which statues stand in public space, whose history they teach, and what happens when communities refuse that lesson—is didacticism in its most literal, spatial form.

In August of 2019, the New York Times published a collection of essays examining the legacy of American slavery under the name The 1619 Project, in reference to the date of the landing of the first enslaved Africans in the colony of Virginia on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of their arrival. The controversy that ensued revealed that fights over public history are often framed as disputes over factual accuracy, but are more deeply struggles over who has the authority to interpret the national past for the public. Spearheaded by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project argued for a radical reframing of the ‘founding’ of the United States with Black Americans at the center of its national narrative and challenged the whiggish conception of U.S. history as a tidy story of post-Revolution progress. 1619 (which has since evolved into a podcast, book, educational curriculum, and Hulu docuseries) sparked a wide, polarized range of reactions. It sold tens of thousands of copies almost immediately; people lined up in the streets to pick up the special edition (Serwer, 2019). It was ranked 8th in the list of top ten journalism works of the decade by the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in 2020, and Nikole Hannah-Jones received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her opening essay. An array of conservative historians penned their critiques, first in right wing magazines, then as scholarly articles.2For a roundup of articles and opinion pieces on the 1619 Project in the year that followed its initial publication see Phill Magness’ “The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography” (2020) in the AIER’s The Daily Economy. See also Adam Serwer’s recap for The Atlantic, “The Fight over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts” (2019). As the project’s designers had hoped, teachers announced plans to use the essays in schools; the project was cited in the 2021 Proposed Priorities of the U.S. Department of Education. The backlash was immediate, and more importantly, legislative: within two years, multiple bills had been introduced at state and federal levels to restrict the curriculum’s use in schools. The Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, established to “promote patriotic education” and combat “left wing indoctrination in [American] schools” (Donald Trump, cited in Wise, 2020) has often been nicknamed the ‘1776 Project’ in sardonic reference to 1619.

The 1619 controversy is ostensibly about the American Revolution, but what it actually stages is a fight over the authority to narrate the longer history of slavery and capitalism in the Atlantic world—of which the Revolution is one episode, and the Golden Age of Piracy another. As historian David Waldstreicher retraces in an article in the Boston Review (2020), contrarily to the image painted by critics of the 1619 Project as unarguably historically inaccurate and ‘partisan’ or crypto-political, the field of U.S. history itself is an ideological battlefield where the question of the political essence of the American Revolution is hotly debated. Of the several points of contention raised in the now famous letter addressed by five historians (Gordon Wood, James Oakes, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and Sean Wilentz, all leading figures in their fields) to the NYT, it is Hannah-Jones’ assertion that U.S. Independence was sought in great part to defend the institution of slavery that has proved the most bothersome. Historians who defend what Waldstreicher defines as the ‘establishment view’ (Bernard Bailyn’s “contagion of liberty” argument, and more generally the idea that the Revolution was in fact fundamentally antislavery) have insistently condemned the project as counterfactual specifically on the grounds that it misrepresents the ideology of the Revolution; but this ignores the work of scholars such as Woody Holton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael McDonnell, Gerald Horne and Waldstreicher himself, among others, which strongly challenges the version of the narrative that “sees the end of slavery as a long-term consequence of American idealism and independence”. This absolutist wording around ‘facts’, repeated in magazines and open letters, would not hold in scholarly articles where one is held to a certain standard regarding the acknowledgement of existing literature and ongoing academic discussions. Waldstreicher (2020) argues that by “bringing the critical ideas of [scholars who see slavery as more than a peripheral matter in the American Revolution] to a wide audience, the 1619 Project essentially drew back the curtain on a vital debate within the field of U.S. history,” and that by “responding with such force, critics of the project have helped define the contours of this debate.” The actual historiographical debate seems to matter way less, however, than the fight over access to the brains of the American public and the maintenance of the sanctity of a specific interpretation of the early history of America in the eyes of the layman—Waldstreicher makes an interesting parallel between the “resistance to this new scholarship by the deans of the establishment” and the accusations of “desecrating the image of the Revolution” leveled against Charles Beard and the Progressive Historians in the early 20th century. Wilentz, for example, “tries to perform a magician’s act and render invisible the very existence of that debate, much as he ignores the scholarship when he is not mischaracterizing its substance” in his opinion piece in the Atlantic (Waldstreicher, 2020). The practice of history, it seems, is to occur only behind closed doors.3This reflection is consistent with the opinion of Americanists surveyed by the Journal of American History in 1994 who thought that historians were discouraged from reaching multiple, non-professional audiences, that academia “looks inwards”, and that they had “given history, public history, to popularizers” (Thelen, 1994). The point being made by most respondents was a critique of an institutional framework that rewards ‘originality’ and publication to the point of irrelevancy, but I believe there are wider conclusions to be drawn on how historians engage with the purpose and implications of their own work. The American general public, however, very much does want to peek behind the Ivy curtain; the sales numbers for the 1619 special edition alone prove that. When Adam Serwer notes in his 2019 summary of the controversy for the Atlantic that there is a “clash between the Times authors and their historian critics” which “represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society”, he misses the pre-existing argument between historians, but he does identify the crux of the issue: that how Americans receive the history of their country’s founding is a political matter, and that our discipline should be very concerned not just with the past itself, but also its popular reception. “I know when I talk to people,” Hannah-Jones told Serwer, “they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.” This thirst for access to historical interpretation at the level of complexity usually reserved for professionals nuances the dominant understanding of the chasm between academic and public history, which posits the public as mostly resistant to new approaches to the national narrative and as viewing history as “merely an agreed-upon body of facts” (Estes, 2006).

The case of 1619 is particularly instructive for a thesis concerned with the popular reception of early American history. What is relevant to the framework of my work is less the granular details of the debate around ‘accuracy’ and more the wider implications of both its popularity, the ensuing backlash, and the framing of the criticism. These reveal an active and acute struggle over interpretations of the past, and make clear that the history of early modern bourgeois nation-making specifically is at the center of burning questions in the belly of the beast, with ramifications spreading far beyond polite back-and-forths in academic journals. The Golden Age of Piracy sits at the heart of this history: as the following chapter aims to demonstrate, that period is the moment at which the Atlantic order, whose legacy is still being fought over, was violently consolidated. In the sense developed in this section, Black Sails belongs to the same field of public historical struggle as curricula, museum exhibitions, musicals, journalistic projects, and commemorative disputes. It is not professional history, but it participates in the public making of historical meaning.

Notes
1
October 2025 – May 2026; co-curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker.
2
For a roundup of articles and opinion pieces on the 1619 Project in the year that followed its initial publication see Phill Magness’ “The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography” (2020) in the AIER’s The Daily Economy. See also Adam Serwer’s recap for The Atlantic, “The Fight over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts” (2019).
3
This reflection is consistent with the opinion of Americanists surveyed by the Journal of American History in 1994 who thought that historians were discouraged from reaching multiple, non-professional audiences, that academia “looks inwards”, and that they had “given history, public history, to popularizers” (Thelen, 1994). The point being made by most respondents was a critique of an institutional framework that rewards ‘originality’ and publication to the point of irrelevancy, but I believe there are wider conclusions to be drawn on how historians engage with the purpose and implications of their own work.
1.2  Towards a theory of critical reception of early America

Studying that struggle rigorously requires a framework that can hold together the professional and the popular, the historical argument and its public afterlife. If Black Sails participates in the public making of historical meaning, then the question is not simply whether it represents the early Atlantic past ‘accurately’. The more useful inquiry is how it receives that past: how it inherits earlier narratives of piracy, enters into dialogue with them, and makes them available to contemporary interpretation. This thesis proposes critical reception as a method for engaging with the afterlives of early America and the Atlantic system: not simply how the past is represented, but how it is transmitted, reconstructed, contested, politicized, and made active in the present.

The dynamic character of the field of early American history is apparent in the many methodological and epistemological changes it has seen over the last few decades, including the emergence of different approaches that center a wider geographical scope and expanded chronological boundaries, as well as an increasingly interdisciplinary orientation (Games, 2004; Piker, 2024; Wulf, 2019). Bailyn was already noting in 1982 that early American history was no longer seen in isolation from European and African history, or even just the purview of historians per se but rather an interdisciplinary endeavor shared with economists, geographers, sociologists, etc. (Bailyn, 1982: 2). Generally, in the postwar period, the direction taken by U.S. scholarship on the subject has been greatly influenced by international trends in historiography such as the emergence of the French Ecole des Annales or of British social history, but also global political upheaval and Cold War ideological conflict.4For more on the relation between the shifts in historiographical trends and wider socio-political shifts see Joyce Appleby’s 1993 article retracing the chronology of postwar scholarship on early America. “A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Apr., 1993, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 245-267. If the relevancy of early American history to 21st century American political life is constantly stressed by historians (Wulf, 2021), most notably in the context of the defense of funding for the humanities, very little attention has been paid in a structured scholarly and ‘methodologically aware’ way to the modern reception of early America, particularly when it comes to the Colonial era. Academic engagement with what David Loyd and Patrick Wolfe call “the fundamental continuity between the historical development of European settler colonialism and the present-day development of the neoliberal world order” (2016: 111) has mostly been limited to Settler Colonial Studies (Veracini, 2021) or very specifically focused on the social construction and current maintenance of race as emerging from the division of labor in Colonial Virginia (Allen, 2012; Bosa, 2012; Kolchin, 2009; Roediger, 2007), coalescing into what is understood today as Whiteness Studies. As illustrated by the example of the 1619 Project, interrogating the political appropriation(s) of the history of the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Americas’ and ‘founding’ of the United States (and here we already encounter a terminology problem containing itself historiographical debate) is particularly topical in the age of illiberalism. 

Departing from traditional historiographical frameworks, I argue for critical reception theory as it is conceptualized within the field of Classical Studies, where it has long provided a way to study how antiquity survives through later interpretation rather than as a stable inheritance: an interrogation of how the early American past is visibly interwoven in the fabric of the American and global present moment5Paraphrased from Hanink (2017) talking about Classical reception. through the study of the ways in which early American material has been “transmitted, translated, excerpted, interpreted, rewritten, re-imaged and represented” (Hardwick and Stray, 2008). I borrow this framework because like classical antiquity, early America operates as an origin-past: a symbolic archive to which later societies return in order to authorize claims about liberty, citizenship, race, democracy, empire, and national destiny.

The main obstacle for an application of the Classical reception paradigm to U.S. history is that this framework is best (or most easily) applied to literary studies, supported by its origin in German literary reception theory (Hans Robert Jauss and the Constance School’s Rezeptionsgeschichte); it works especially well in the context of the study of Antiquity where the border between political and literary history is particularly porous. In its most simplistic form, this reception work is often reduced to “the list of authors, often pleasingly unknown, who have written a work in response to a classical text or figure” (Goldhill, 2010: 61). The questions raised by reception scholars about the transmission of ancient texts are however fundamentally anchored in historical analysis: why were there so many translations and commentaries on this text? Were they all asking the same questions in the same form, or was there a debate? What social or intellectual needs were they addressing? Were they actually read? What was the transnational mediation?6Paraphrased from Goldhill (2010) writing about the transmission and translation of Aristotle in Renaissance Italy and France. Classicists have, since the emergence of reception as a distinct subfield, reflected extensively on reception as beyond a mere history/study of transmission. Charles Martindale, in his seminal work Redeeming the Text (1993) and subsequent essay “Reception — a new humanism?” (2013), develops a model of reception that is “figured dialogically, as a two-way process of understanding, backwards and forwards, which illuminates antiquity as much as modernity” (2013: 171). The two key terms are thus dialogue and the transhistorical. Martindale does however remain mostly within a framework interested in literary reception,7Not to misrepresent his argument: he does note “I use the word ‘text’ in the extended postmodern sense in which it might be used of a sculpture or a marriage ceremony or a performance or a historical narrative” (Martindale, 2013: 174), but his own research interests do lie in Latin poetry, and this is reflected in his examples and argumentation. For more on Martindale and aesthetics see Goldhill, 2010. the reception of the classical text and thus mainly within the realm of aesthetics. But a similar argument for dialogic reception is made by French historian of antiquity Nicole Loraux, for whom reception is above all the way the historian uses the present to interrogate the past and reintroduce this knowledge back to their understanding of the present. Drawing from the fertile redefinition of History by the Ecole des Annales and from the big shift that the Ecole de Paris operated in the study of Ancient Greece, Loraux worked tirelessly on redefining the relation of the historian to his object, especially the inevitable and hotly debated principle of avoiding anachronism in the study of history. Part of her motivation was to make explicit that the present is inescapable in the study of the past. Recognizing the necessity of an “usage contrôlé de l’anachronisme”, a conscious and controlled use of anachronism, she posited the present as the “most powerful motor of the pulsion to understand Antiquity” (Loraux, 2005: 129). Both Loraux’s move and Martindale’s dialogic approach are precisely what a critical reading of Black Sails requires: the show does not simply represent the Atlantic past but enters into dialogue with it, using the present to determine what that past can mean politically.

Younger classicists who are proponents of bringing in tenets of ‘critical studies’ such as Critical Race Theory or Gender Studies into their practice of Classical reception present the interest in the relationship between Greek and Roman antiquity and the reproduction and maintenance of violent social structures as a new direction for the field (Hanink, 2017), but the reality is that critical engagement with not just the ancient past but the processes of transmission and interpretation of the ancient past are, as demonstrated above, much older than the 2010s. Still, the framework of critical reception is useful as a shorthand for the kind of historiographical practice I would like to engage in, which is one both ideologically and methodologically aware of the dialectics inherent to the work of the historian and of the direct correlation between the process of extracting meaning from the past and the construction of meaning in the present. Beyond the debate among classicists which is heavily defined by their disciplinary backgrounds as historians, philologists etc., we need to understand reception as an active process in the sense that it is greatly dependent on the focus of the receiver. Reception is transmission that nests and develops within active ideologies and cultures, consciously and subliminally. Thus transmission progressively morphs into different traditions, even within the same country or cultural and linguistic locale; in the case of the United States, there are very polarized processes of reception. Historians should interrogate the process of differential reception, as it leads to active and acute social conflict. 

Historiography studies how historians have interpreted the past; memory studies interrogate how societies remember and commemorate it. Reception asks how historical material is taken up, transformed, and made meaningful in new contexts. The categories overlap, but reception is especially useful here because it treats later works not as distortions of an original past, but as active interventions that reshape what that past can mean. Of course many scholars effectively ‘do’ reception—they do not frame their work as such, but they are engaging with later material in conversation with early America. They work on representations of the past; they work on memory. There is a rich body of scholarship retracing the reception of Jefferson’s writings and Jeffersonian philosophy, the latest example being Hannah Spahn’s 2024 monograph Black Reason, White Feeling in which she argues that the rationalism and universalism most associated with Jefferson today actually sprang from critical engagements with his thought by contemporary and later African-American writers. But this work is either mostly operated from outside the field of early American history (media studies, performance studies, art history, political science, philosophy, even psychoanalysis), or ‘limited’ to a history of transmission. What remains underdeveloped is a consolidated methodological account of reception as a problem internal to early American history itself.

Beyond peripheral commentary about the public consumption of historical narratives on the occasion of bicentenary commemorations or arguments about whose face should be on dollar bills, why should the study of the construction of national mythologies be the purview of cultural theorists, sociologists, or political scientists, rather than of the people who study the primary sources those mythologies are built upon in the first place? Going back to Waldstreicher on the historiographical debate in the background of the 1619 Project controversy: when he writes “What else can we expect in a republic built on slavery as well as on antislavery, and on the denial of both aspects of our past?”, the focus is too often entirely on “built on slavery as well as on antislavery” rather than on “[built] on the denial of both aspects of our past”. Denial is itself a historical afterlife. It is one of the ways early America survives in the present: not only through commemoration, adaptation, and appropriation, but through the repeated management of what can and cannot be publicly acknowledged. If modern myths of founding, liberty, empire, and race are built from the archive early Americanists study, then their reception should be treated as part of the field’s object, not merely as commentary upon it.

This is where Black Sails becomes more than an adaptation or historical drama. Its object is not only Golden Age piracy in its historical moment, but the afterlife of pirate mythology: a tradition that has repeatedly transformed imperial violence, maritime labor, slavery, and colonial resistance into adventure, romance, and national myth. To read the show critically is therefore to ask not only what it represents of the early Atlantic past, but what inherited denials it makes visible. In practical terms, this means reading Black Sails not only for what it says about the eighteenth-century Atlantic, but for how it reworks inherited mythos, contests master narratives, and also how it makes early American history available to contemporary political interpretation.

Notes
4
For more on the relation between the shifts in historiographical trends and wider socio-political shifts see Joyce Appleby’s 1993 article retracing the chronology of postwar scholarship on early America. “A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Apr., 1993, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 245-267.
5
Paraphrased from Hanink (2017) talking about Classical reception.
6
Paraphrased from Goldhill (2010) writing about the transmission and translation of Aristotle in Renaissance Italy and France.
7
Not to misrepresent his argument: he does note “I use the word ‘text’ in the extended postmodern sense in which it might be used of a sculpture or a marriage ceremony or a performance or a historical narrative” (Martindale, 2013: 174), but his own research interests do lie in Latin poetry, and this is reflected in his examples and argumentation. For more on Martindale and aesthetics see Goldhill, 2010.

1.3  History need not be done on the page

If reception studies allows us to ask how early America is transmitted and politicized in later cultural forms, historiophoty gives us the tools to ask how that process works specifically in visual media.

In 1988, when Robert Brent Toplin published “The Filmmaker as Historian” in an American Historical Review forum issue, the academic interest in historical film (documentaries, docudramas, and historical fiction) among historians was mostly limited to film as a mirror of contemporary values, and film as historical artefact. Both approaches were well established; both kept film at a safe analytical distance from the historian’s own practice. What Toplin and, separately, Robert Rosenstone were beginning to argue (and what the 1988 AHR forum made explicit) was something more complex: that filmmakers were already functioning as historians in practice, conveying interpretations of the past to audiences who received them as such, whether or not the profession was paying attention. Toplin’s conclusion was characteristically blunt. Until historians more aggressively judged the filmmaker as historian, they would leave the field of popular historical interpretation “by default, to people who operate free of the pressures that monitor scholarship”. He quoted a filmmaker who expressed surprise at the latitude a producer enjoys in rendering history to the public: “Nobody is watching us” (1988: 1227).

Rosenstone diagnoses why historians were so reluctant to watch in Visions of the Past. The covert objection to historical film, he argues, runs deeper than complaints about inaccuracy or dramatic license: “film is out of the control of historians. Film shows we do not own the past. Film creates a historical world with which books cannot compete, at least for popularity. Film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly postliterate world (in which people can read but won’t)” (1995: 46). The overt objection—that film distorts, trivializes, romanticizes—is real enough, and not without foundation. But it tends to be deployed selectively, against visual media, while the same constructedness in written history goes unremarked. Historians “tend to use written works of history to critique visual history as if that written history were itself something solid and unproblematic”, when history is, as Rosenstone insists, “never a mirror but a construction, congeries of data pulled together or ‘constituted’ by some larger project or vision or theory that may not be articulated but is nonetheless embedded in the particular way history is practiced” (1995: 49). The “appropriate questions” to ask of a historical film are therefore the same ones we ask of a monograph: what sort of historical world does it construct, how does it construct it, and how can we make judgments about that construction (1995: 50)?

It is within this context that Hayden White coined the term historiophoty in the same 1988 AHR forum: “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse” (1988: 1193). The theoretical grounding for the concept draws on White’s earlier work on written history: “every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation” (1988: 1194). The discursive mode of visual representation differs from that of verbal discourse—this is not a distinction White or Rosenstone deny—but the cognitive processes underlying both are shared. This matters because it means the difference between written and visual history is a difference in medium and convention, not a difference in kind. Marc Ferro had already made a version of this argument in his seminal Cinéma et Histoire (1977), treating film as a historical agent rather than merely a historical mirror, though his framework remained primarily focused on film as document. Since then, the field has grown substantially: Rosenstone’s own subsequent work, alongside film studies scholars like Marcia Landy and James Chapman, has established historiophoty as a legitimate subfield with its own methods and its own critical standards (Barta, 1998; Chapman, 2013; Landy, 2001; Rosenstone, 2006).

The absence of footnotes and visible archival work in a television series is, in this framework, a feature of the medium rather than evidence of intellectual vacancy. The question of sourcing is real—there is no equivalent in visual media to the scholarly apparatus that allows a reader to trace an argument back to its primary sources—but it is being asked at the wrong level of analysis. The relevant question is whether the historical claims a work makes can be evaluated against the scholarly literature, and whether the interpretive framework it brings to the past is coherent and defensible. This thesis is, in a sense, a demonstration that this kind of evaluation is possible: reading Black Sails against Rediker, Policante, Linebaugh, and others is an act of historiographical accountability that the show both invites and, I will argue, survives.

There is a further dimension to this argument that goes beyond methodology, and it is one that a handful of scholar-practitioners have articulated from inside the practice itself. Abrash and Walkowitz, writing in History Workshop in 1994 about their own work as historian-filmmakers, are direct about it: “we see all history-writing as a political act [...] histories generally serve to validate or naturalize power relations, but also can be used to disrupt or destabilize taken-for-granted views of the past” (1994: 204). Their reason for working in visual media was equally direct: they wanted to reach audiences that monographs could not, and they understood that working in the medium was itself a way of doing history differently—“broadening the range of evidence, and experimenting with narrative forms that resonate with the way reality is experienced” (1994: 204). Their first film, Molders of Troy (1980), a fictionalized history of the Irish ironworkers of Troy, N.Y. in the mid-19th century, brought the New Social History to a working-class audience in a deindustrializing city that had no access to the scholarship being produced about its own history. The political content of that choice—who history is for, and in what form it reaches them—is inseparable from the historical content of the film itself.

Anirudh Deshpande observes that historians who insist exclusively on documentary sources and monograph form “end up writing the history of only ten percent of the human population” (2004: 4457). The gatekeeping instinct—the refusal to take visual media seriously unless it conforms to the standards of written scholarship—is not a neutral methodological position. It is a decision about whose past gets recovered and how, and who gets to receive it. In the public sphere in the Habermasian sense, historical consciousness is formed not primarily through academic journals but through the media that mass audiences actually engage with. Swaminathan and Thomas, situating film and television within what they describe as a tradition of “public pedagogy”, argue that screen media “encodes values, orients its audience’s relationship to the past, and prompts critical dialogue” (2018: 4); and that this function operates whether or not historians choose to engage with it. De Groot’s concept of “historiocopia” captures the scale of what is at stake: the past now lives simultaneously across television, film, games, social media, and commemorative practice, in “a multi-media, multi-platformed way” that no single disciplinary framework fully accounts for (2016: xv).

When historians abandon this terrain, they do not make it less political; they leave it to those who, as Toplin’s unnamed filmmaker observed, operate entirely free of the pressures that monitor scholarship. The risk of abandoning this terrain is not abstract. Greenberg, writing about the contest between academic history and commercial entertainment in the late 1990s, put it plainly: Disney and other megacorporations believe that “history sells”, and the public’s appetite for the past is largely being fed by products whose emotional pull is inversely proportional to their historiographical seriousness (Greenberg, 1998: 303). His proposed corrective, that cultural institutions such as museums exploit the emotive power of their collections to reach wider audiences without sacrificing scholarly integrity, remains within an institutional framework that television, by definition, falls outside. But the conclusion that popular visual media is therefore lost to ‘Disney logic’ does not follow. It mistakes the dominant tendency for the only possible one. Rosenstone notes that filmmakers across Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe have long understood this, making films that function as “a filmic equivalent of the New Social History”—giving voice to those the mainstream cinema has always ignored, doing in images what history from below does on the page (Rosenstone, 1995: 9). Black Sails, despite its production within commercial prestige television rather than activist documentary, belongs to this tendency in practical ways. It takes Rediker’s argument about who built the Atlantic world, who resisted it, and what was foreclosed when that resistance was crushed to an audience that will never read his monograph Villains of All Nations, and it does so in a form that carries genuine historiographical content. The absence of footnotes is real; the argument is too. This thesis demonstrates that the tools exist to evaluate it.

Part One  ·  Chapter II
Chapter II

Hostis Humani Generis

A merry Life and short one!

— Reported motto of Atlantic pirates, c.1718.
2.1  Mapping the Outlaw

The Golden Age pirate is a creature of the Atlantic—produced by its labor regimes, shaped by its violence, and ultimately destroyed by the imperial order that could no longer tolerate him. At the center of that order, in the early eighteenth century, sat the British Caribbean. The British Empire’s holdings in the region were one of the main engines of its economic fortunes: British imperial maritime power was foundational to the historical formation of global capitalism insofar as it organized an unprecedented integration of distant regions, commodities, and labor regimes into a single circulatory apparatus. British trade linked West African slaving coasts, Caribbean plantation economies, Asian commercial routes, and European markets through interdependent flows of enslaved labor, plantation commodities, bullion, manufactured goods, and the naval stores required to sustain maritime dominance, producing a world economy structured around long-distance circulation and imperial violence (Policante, 2015: 77; Rediker 1989: 21). The British West Indies occupied a strufcturally privileged position within this configuration: Caribbean plantation colonies constituted the most “valuable and intimate link” in these global circuits, anchoring the extraction of slave-produced wealth and binding together Atlantic and Asian trade within an imperial system with London at its center (Deane, 2010: 55). Beyond their role in shaping the economies of Britain’s mainland colonies in North America such as New England, the West Indies are therefore central to the study of the historical emergence of the economic system that defined modernity and persists into the present. 

New England’s colonial economy, often described as a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society” (Beckert and Rockman, 2016: 20), nonetheless depended structurally on enslaved labor that was geographically displaced: through the carrying trade, provisioning of plantation economies, re-export of slave-grown commodities, and financial and maritime infrastructures that sustained Caribbean slavery (Kimball, 2016: 182). From the seventeenth century onward, colonial economic actors recognized a global division of labor that bound northern ports and plantation societies into a single system, one in which circulation was as indispensable as production. Recent histories of capitalism have underscored that such circuits of exchange were not ancillary to capitalist development but among its defining features (Beckert and Rockman, 2016: 27). Refuting histories that treat slavery and capitalism as antithetical modes of production, this scholarship has located the Atlantic plantation complex at the center of capitalist modernity, emphasizing the general commodification of labor across legal statuses and racial regimes and the emergence of a “motley” Atlantic proletariat composed of enslaved, indentured, and precarious free workers (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000; Rediker, 2004; Beckert and Rockman, 2016). From this perspective, early American history as well as the history of capitalism cannot be disentangled from the oceanic systems that sustained slavery, finance, and imperial expansion well before the rise of industrial wage labor.

Central to this Atlantic system was the ocean itself. Far from functioning as a neutral medium of transit, the sea constituted a historically specific space in which the emerging capitalist order was both enabled and contested. The seventeenth-century ocean remained marked by a juridical ambiguity that was, in Policante’s terms, both productive and dangerous for the empires that relied on it: formally outside the reach of metropolitan law, yet integral to imperial warfare, privateering, and primitive accumulation (Policante, 2015: 72). Even as Empire intervened, even as state actors were active in the waters, in the 1600s the ocean still reflected the porosity and instability of medieval, pre-modern state formation. The amity lines—those informal but widely recognized boundaries beyond which European treaties held no force—had organized oceanic space as a permanent state of exception: beyond the line, in the formulation that had become a diplomatic catchword since the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (1559), “the only matter they could agree upon was the freedom of the open spaces” (Schmitt, 2003, cited in Policante, 2015: 54). Within this exceptional space, the categories that would later harden into law remained deliberately fluid. The same men, sometimes on the same voyage, moved between the positions of privateer, freebooter, and outright pirate as political circumstances required—a fluidity that served imperial interests precisely because it was deniable. This exceptionality facilitated widespread violence, plunder, and enslavement, but it also produced conditions for recurrent rebellion, mutiny, and the temporary inversion of established hierarchies. The same freedom to expropriate that sustained Empire could, at times, be turned against the imperial states that had sanctioned it. With the erasure of the amity lines and the universalization of international law and property rights in the early eighteenth century, this productive ambiguity became intolerable. The Atlantic began reflecting the social transformation of the Old World, transmuting from a site of relative flux—where a sustained contest took place between Empire and the seafarers who both served and resisted it (Thomson, 1994: 154)—into what Policante identifies as the first embodiment of the world market (2015: 73).

The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) sanctioned a collective appropriation of oceanic space by the major maritime powers, initiating a sustained effort to stabilize commercial circulation and suppress forms of mobility that resisted discipline. The figures who had long populated the waters—privateers operating under letters of marque, freebooters working in the greyer territory of plausible deniability, buccaneers whose targets aligned, when convenient, with imperial interest—shared a fundamental instrumentalizability. As Policante notes (drawing on Tilly, Thomson, and others), pirates and privateers “played an instrumental role in the violent processes inherent in state-building” throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their depredations simultaneously acts of war and forms of primitive accumulation (2015: 73). After Utrecht, this relationship inverted. The stabilization of Atlantic commerce required predictable maritime labor and disciplined oceanic circulation; the freebooter who had once served imperial ends was now a structural obstacle to them. Men who had been celebrated as servants of Empire were required to submit unconditionally to its authority or be reclassified as its enemies. The “paradigmatic figures of the space of exception beyond the line [were] forced either to enter the order of the state, supporting the evolution of the modern navy and the modern army, or to be declared enemies of the modern international system” (Policante, 2015: 73).

Those who refused were denationalized and designated hostis humani generis, to be hunted down and eliminated not as ordinary criminals but as threats to an emerging international order (Policante, 2015: 80; Steinberg, 1999: 258). In the branding of the pirate as a common enemy of the global order, even as empires are in active conflict with one another, we see international law and the concept of international ruling bodies in their budding stages. Beyond this, we also see an early articulation of the transnational consensus necessary to safeguard the common interests of the global ruling class, irrespective of competing concurrent national interests. A principle of common imperium over the oceans of the world started to affirm itself: beyond coastal waters, no single state could impose its own laws, and only international legal principles that were “generally recognized” were considered valid, interpreted and enforced by a community of states (Steinberg, 1999: 260). The criminalization of piracy was thus constitutive of modern imperial power and its legitimization8Interestingly enough, hostis humani generis is a term still used today in international maritime law.. 

It is within this moment of transition that this chapter situates its analysis. Historians have long debated the temporal boundaries of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, variously locating its origins in the mid-seventeenth century or in the aftermath of European imperial wars (Arnaudov, 2008: 9). In his initial formulation, Marcus Rediker placed its beginning at 1716, the year the post-Utrecht generation of pirates began operating in earnest (Arnaudov, 2008: 9, citing Rediker, 1981). He subsequently proposed a longer arc spanning from 1650 to 1730, encompassing three distinct generations: the Caribbean buccaneers of 1650–80, the Indian Ocean pirates of the 1690s, and the Atlantic pirates of 1716–26 (Arnaudov, 2008: 10, citing Rediker, 2004). Other historians, following the wide reach of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678), have pushed the starting date earlier still—Alexander Winston for example to 1665; while David Cordingly treats the entire period from the mid-1660s to the mid-1720s as a continuous history of heightened maritime depredation, legally sanctioned or otherwise (Arnaudov, 2008: 10, 19). These debates are not merely chronological. The question of when the Golden Age began and ended is inseparable from the question of what piracy was—opportunistic crime, proto-national conflict, class resistance, or some unstable combination of all three—and which generation of pirates most clearly embodied the political content that later scholars would seek to recover.

Rediker writes in the tradition established by E.P. Thompson’s history from below—the recovery of working-class experience and political consciousness from the margins of the historical record. Where Thompson excavated the making of the English working class from its own cultural forms, its rituals, languages, and acts of resistance, Rediker applies the same methodological commitment to the maritime world: the pirate’s articles, the gallows speech, the mutiny are not colorful footnotes but primary evidence of a class in the process of understanding its own situation. What this tradition demands, and what distinguishes Rediker from earlier legal and institutional historians of piracy, is that the sources produced by and about the dispossessed be read for their political content rather than filtered through the assumptions of those who produced the official record.

Applying this framework to the post-Utrecht generation specifically, Rediker thus reads piracy as a form of class conflict. His central figure, the proletarian outlaw, is a structural type: a man produced by the specific conditions of maritime capitalism who turns those conditions against the system that created him. Following Rediker, my thesis adopts this narrower focus on the pirates active in the Caribbean in the years after Utrecht. This periodization does not seek to account for piracy in its entirety, but to foreground a historically specific figure whose emergence and annihilation illuminate the broader transformations of the Atlantic world.

The sailor of the early eighteenth century was, in Rediker’s account, embedded in a labor system of considerable violence. The deep-sea sailing ship was, as Rediker and Linebaugh put it in The Many-Headed Hydra, a “prototype of the factory”: a site of intensely collective, precisely synchronized labor where “hands” (those who owned no property and sold their labor for a money wage) cooperated to make the machine go (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 150). The captain held almost unlimited disciplinary authority, backed by law and ready to use the cat-o’-nine-tails; conditions aboard were characterized by rotten provisions, chronic wage arrears, devastating disease, and impressment into the Royal Navy, where things were, if anything, worse (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 160; Rediker, 2004: 26). The structural position of the sailor was unambiguous: dispossessed of any productive property, entirely dependent on the wage, and generating the circulation of Atlantic wealth while sharing minimally in its rewards.

Out of these conditions emerged what Rediker identifies as a distinctive maritime working-class culture, whose core values (collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism) were “summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: ‘they were one & all resolved to stand by one another’” (Rediker, 2004: 26). When sailors turned pirate, they carried this culture with them and extended it into an alternative social form. By seizing a merchant vessel through mutiny or capture, a pirate crew took control of the means of maritime production and reorganized it on different principles. They “abolished the wage relation central to the process of capitalist accumulation” and “commanded the ship as their own property”, sharing equally in the risks and rewards of their common venture (Rediker, 2004: 71; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 163). Ship’s articles established elected leadership, collective decision-making through councils, and explicitly egalitarian distribution of plunder: captains and quartermasters received between one and a half and two shares; all other crew members received one share each—“one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the early eighteenth century” (Rediker, 2004: 70). The very first item in the articles of Bartholomew Roberts (the most prolific and extensively documented of the post-Utrecht pirates) guaranteed every man “a Vote in Affairs of Moment” and “equal Title” to provisions and drink, linking political and economic democracy in a single document (Rediker, 2004: 71). Captains who exceeded their authority could be, and were, deposed by crew vote; as one naval captain who interrogated captured pirates put it, “the enjoyment of posts aboard [pirate ships] are very precarious, depending wholly upon the will and pleasure of the crew” (Rediker, 2004: 69-70).

The contrast with the merchant vessel, where the captain’s word was absolute, the sailors’ labor was purchased as cheaply as possible, and any collective resistance was mutiny, punishable by death, was total and understood as such by everyone involved. This is the interpretive crux of Rediker’s argument: pirate democracy was an argument made in practice, against the organization of the ship that the sailors had escaped and were now attacking. When the Republic of Pirates at Nassau sheltered almost a thousand men and women outside the jurisdiction of any colonial authority at its height in the years around 1716–1718 (Rediker, 2004: 29), it constituted historical evidence that the ship, and the society organized around it, could be run otherwise. The criminalization of piracy and the systematic destruction of Nassau, accomplished through pardons, naval suppression, and mass executions between 1718 and 1726, more than merely restoring ‘order’, foreclosed a demonstrated alternative9The point here is not to romanticize Nassau as a fully emancipatory social order; rather, it is to understand why even its partial, unstable refusal of wage discipline and imperial sovereignty appeared intolerable to colonial power.—and in doing so helped to fix the terms on which Atlantic capitalism would consolidate. 

This timeline puts us at the heart of settler colonial development. This is relevant beyond chronology; it means there is an additional political dimension to account for if we understand settler colonialism as outlined by Wolfe (2006), as an organizing structure and not an event or simply an extractive method. The colonisation of the so-called New World was not only motivated by the exploitation of new territories and expansion of imperialist claims, but also a strategy to preempt the revolutionary potential of destabilized societies in Europe with the advent of capitalism10On settler colonialism as a political idea and deliberate strategy of displacement see Veracini, 2021.. It resolved intractable problems in the metropole by turning the world ‘inside out’,11Echoing Hill’s famous formulation of a “world turned upside down” from his 1972 monograph of the same title. deferring internal contradictions and class conflict by displacing them abroad, to the outside12Taken without the additional contributions of SCS this is, of course, the rudimentary Marxian theory of imperialism. The critical move in the literature is then to present the contemporary world as now folded back in, a world permeated and structured by the “logics” of settler colonialism (Veracini, 2021).. This is made explicit, for example, in Richard Hakluyt’s sixteenth-century project of North American colonization which he argued would relocate England’s “wanderinge beggars [...] that growe upp ydly and hurtefull and burdenous to this Realme” (cited in Veracini, 2021: 30). From this distinct political idea emerges a very specific belief that underlies settler imaginaries: that the establishment of regenerative newly settled polities can function as an alternative to revolution. 

The Atlantic passage was the route along which colonial capitalism displaced its contradictions westward: landlessness and unemployment redirected into colonial settlement and maritime labor. But it was also a terrain on which those contradictions were fought out, the bourgeois solution to this crisis of European proletarianization ardently resisted. The war on piracy, in that sense, is class conflict made legible as such: the covert war the exploiting class wages against the exploited turned into literal armed conflict. 

Yet the political meaning of Nassau cannot be understood through class antagonism alone, or at least not a reading of it that does not conceptualize processes of racialization as constitutive to capitalism. The political-economic system pirates disrupted and defied was regimented by the logic of race, and the pirate crew’s challenge to maritime discipline was inseparable from its unstable relation to slavery, marronage, and the racial line of demarcation.

Notes
8
Interestingly enough, hostis humani generis is a term still used today in international maritime law.
9
The point here is not to romanticize Nassau as a fully emancipatory social order; rather, it is to understand why even its partial, unstable refusal of wage discipline and imperial sovereignty appeared intolerable to colonial power.
10
On settler colonialism as a political idea and deliberate strategy of displacement see Veracini, 2021.
11
Echoing Hill’s famous formulation of a “world turned upside down” from his 1972 monograph of the same title.
12
Taken without the additional contributions of SCS this is, of course, the rudimentary Marxian theory of imperialism. The critical move in the literature is then to present the contemporary world as now folded back in, a world permeated and structured by the “logics” of settler colonialism (Veracini, 2021).

2.2  The Motley Crew

The Atlantic system described in the preceding section was a racial order. This is a structural observation: the enclosure of the ocean, the criminalization of piracy, and the construction of the maritime state were simultaneously the construction of a regime in which race organized labor, life, and the distribution of violence. This regime was characterized by the unequal exploitation of labor-power and differential allocation of rights across arbitrary and shifting phenotypical criteria, as well as the extraction of resources (including human beings) from conquered colonial territories. What made piracy in the region intolerable was not only the economic disruption of Atlantic circulation but the political threat the motley crew posed to the racial architecture on which that circulation depended. Atlantic capital accumulation required the line of racial demarcation to hold: where it did, the wage could be stolen entirely from some and merely partially for others; where it broke down, the possibility of solidarity across that line became visible.

The construction of whiteness as a deliberate ruling-class strategy has a precise documented genealogy in the Anglo-American plantation colonies: Theodore Allen’s foundational account locates its origin in the decades following Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–77), when four hundred Englishmen and enslaved Africans had fought together and posed the question of who should rule (Allen, 2012b: 281). The “white race,” in Allen’s view, was not a pre-existing social fact but a ruling-class social-control formation: systematic conferral of privileges on European-American laborers, the blocking of cross-racial solidarity, and the imposition of escalating disabilities on African-Americans were a conscious decision to head off unified resistance to exploitation and expropriation, not an “unthinking” one by the plantation bourgeoisie (Allen, 2012a: 8–11).13The mechanism Allen describes is what David Roediger, drawing on Du Bois, famously calls the “wages of whiteness”: privileges that functioned even for the lowest-paid white workers as compensation for the alienation of capitalism in exchange for loyalty to the system (Roediger, 2007). Beyond ‘simple’ economic alternative, the pirate ship’s offer of collective ownership, democratic governance, and rough equality was arguably a direct competitor to this arrangement. Gerald Horne extends this argument into the eighteenth century, showing how the acceleration of the slave trade after the deregulation of 1688 deepened the stakes of maintaining that racial line: the cross-class coalition of whiteness was the political condition of possibility for the expansion of Atlantic capitalism (Horne, 2018: 115). Patrick Wolfe, mapping the same process across the wider imperial apparatus, locates the emergence of processes of negative racialization in the “colonial laboratory” of the eighteenth century: a system of control and classification based in dispossession whose main purpose was to “accommodate the complexity of imperialism’s far-flung network[s] of unequal social relations” (2016: 8).

At sea, however, the very labor regime that served this racial order repeatedly placed those whom it sought to divide into shared conditions of coercion. The conscripted ‘press gang’ that filled the Royal Navy’s ships as well as the mass of sailors inhabiting the underbellies of merchant ships drew from the most marginal populations of the Atlantic world (dispossessed Irish, Africans, indigenous workers)—even after the Navigation Act of 1651 which required that three fourths of a crew importing English goods were to be English or Irish. They worked alongside one another under identical conditions of brutal exploitation and discipline: the racial line that was being consolidated on land was never perfectly enforceable at sea (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 151). The ship became a “forcing house of internationalism”, a structural consequence of imperial scale itself: “forced by the magnitude of its own enterprise to bring huge and heterogeneous masses of men and women together aboard ship”, European imperialism “created the conditions for the circulation of experience within the huge masses of labor that it had set in motion” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 152). Maritime capitalism had therefore already been producing the circumstances for cross-racial solidarity before anyone turned pirate. The pirate ship did not ‘invent’ multiracial fraternity but radicalized a tendency latent in the shared experience of those whom the Atlantic system had most thoroughly dispossessed. 

The motley crew of the pirate ship makes this visible because on deck, the enforcement of racial boundaries and hierarchies of the time was often practically contested. The pirate ship of the post-Utrecht Atlantic was, in Linebaugh and Rediker’s formulation, multinational, multicultural, and multiracial; this was constitutive of its social character rather than incidental to it (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 164). In 1718, sixty of Blackbeard’s hundred-strong crew were Black; Captain William Lewis counted forty Black sailors among his eighty hands; Oliver La Bouche’s ship in 1719 was half French, half African (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 166). Black crewmen were not marginal to pirate operations: they formed part of the pirate vanguard, the most trusted men designated to board prize vessels, and a free Black cook divided provisions equally aboard Francis Spriggs’s ship so that the crew might live well (Rediker, 2004: 54). Both free men and escaped slaves found on the pirate ship one of the very few spaces in the early eighteenth-century Atlantic—alongside Maroon communities—where the racial order of plantation society did not automatically obtain (Rediker, 2004: 54). Erin Mackie’s formulation is precise: what pirates and Maroons share is that both constitute “sustained and organized refusals of participation in the two central institutions of the colonial machine: plantation slavery and the vastly expanded merchant navy” (Mackie, 2005: 32). 

The parallel was not lost on contemporaries—pirate ships were called “marooners” by their crews, and the ship of captain Thomas Cocklyn was named the Maroon (Rediker, 2004: 56); nor on the colonial authorities whose correspondence betrays a consistent fear not of maritime disruption alone but of the crossing of the color line. Virginia’s rulers worried openly about the connection between the “Ravage of Pyrates” and “an Insurrection of the Negroes”; Lieutenant Governor Bennett of Bermuda feared that enslaved people would not defend the island against pirates but join them (Rediker, 2004: 55). When enslaved people in Antigua grew restive in 1716, a substantial number went to join pirates “who did not seem too concerned about color differences” (Hugh Rankin, 1969, cited in Rediker, 2004: 55).

The material stakes of that challenge are measurable. Angela Sutton’s archival work on the Royal Africa Company demonstrates that between 1681 and 1699 alone, before the Golden Age reached its zenith, RAC correspondence records forty-four separate mentions of piracy in relation to the slave trade (Sutton, 2009: 10). King James II had commissioned a man-of-war as early as 1687 specifically to protect the RAC’s monopoly from pirates along the African coast (Sutton, 2009: 1). The final push to destroy Nassau was driven in large measure by the demands of slave-trading interests: the years of peak pirate activity, 1720–1722, saw the lowest slave trade export volumes of the period, and the numbers surged immediately after suppression—from 24,780 enslaved people embarked in 1720 to 49,130 in 1729 (Rediker, 2004: 144–145). As Rediker puts it, if plantation capital killed the first generation of pirates and East India Company capital killed the pirates of the 1690s, it was African slave-trading capital that killed the pirates of the early eighteenth century (Rediker, 2004: 144–145). The suppression of Nassau was an event in the history of slavery.

The pirate ship was therefore one of the sites where the ruling class’ investment in racial division was most nakedly legible, because aboard, it was dangerously inconsistent. The same conditions that made it a space of partial refusal also marked its limits. Colonial officials routinely declined to try Black pirates, selling them back into slavery rather than hanging them alongside white crewmates (Rediker, 2004: 54). The logic of this asymmetry echoes the racial mechanism Cheryl Harris identifies in “Whiteness as Property”: through slavery, “race and economic domination were fused” and the color line functioned as “a line of protection and demarcation from the potential threat of commodification” (Harris, 1993: 1718, 1721). A Black pirate who had temporarily escaped his side of that line would be returned to it upon capture, not afforded escape from commodification and dehumanization even in committing a crime punishable by death. Some pirates had themselves worked the slave trade and remained implicated in its machinery; pirate ships occasionally captured and sold human cargo, and were sometimes shockingly violent against captured slaves (Rediker, 2004: 189). In Madagascar, the small dozen of pirates that had made their home on the island in the early 1700s possessed a “small army of slaves” (Woodard: 119). The racial order was thus threatened but not destroyed, intermittently locally suspended but not abolished. These limits are a structural problem that Black Sails inherits when it stages the revolutionary horizon of Nassau—the question of whether the freedom the Republic of Pirates represented could ever have meant the same thing to those for whom the ocean was not a space of relative flux but the route of the Middle Passage. That thread runs through the show’s final seasons and is examined in Chapter 6. 

Notes
13
The mechanism Allen describes is what David Roediger, drawing on Du Bois, famously calls the “wages of whiteness”: privileges that functioned even for the lowest-paid white workers as compensation for the alienation of capitalism in exchange for loyalty to the system (Roediger, 2007). Beyond ‘simple’ economic alternative, the pirate ship’s offer of collective ownership, democratic governance, and rough equality was arguably a direct competitor to this arrangement.

2.3  A Republic of Pirates

Nicknamed the ‘Republic of Pirates’, the island of Nassau (currently New Providence) was the place where the shipboard experiment in democratic self-organization became, however briefly, a social fact on land. In 1713, the War of the Spanish Succession ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, leaving thousands of sailors and privateers without employment, and the Bahama Islands effectively without government. Into that vacuum, from 1714 onward, unemployed mariners began to drift—men who had spent years operating under letters of marque and who, with the peace, found themselves discharged into a labor market that had no use for them (Policante, 2015: 73; Woodard, 2007: 86). Particularly attractive to them was Nassau’s position near major Caribbean trade routes, its shallow waters which made naval pursuit by larger men-of-war difficult, and the abundance of provisions and local support networks that sustained them (Rediker, 2004: 29). Benjamin Hornigold, a former privateer, was among the first to make Nassau his base of operations: he gathered around him a loose coalition of sailors, former privateers, and escaped servants that would come to call itself the Flying Gang (Woodard, 2007: 113). Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia noted with alarm that pirates treated the Bahamas as “a General Rendezvous & seem to look upon those Islands as their own”. A royal official complained of a “nest of pirates” who “already esteem themselves a community, and to have one common interest” (Rediker, 2004: 95). 

The scale of what they built matters: in 1717 a Philadelphia merchant estimated 1,500 pirates were active, 800 of them based at Providence. Multiple observers from the Bahamas, South Carolina, and Bermuda put the figure at or near 2,000 between 1718 and 1720. Rediker, drawing on contemporary records, estimates that in total some 4,000 men went “upon the account” between 1716 and 1726, operating against a Royal Navy that averaged only 13,000 hands in any given year of the same period (Rediker, 2004: 29–30). These are not the numbers of a criminal fringe. They represent a social phenomenon of real scale, one that contemporaries tracked with something closer to political anxiety than ordinary law enforcement concern.

The settlement’s politics were fractured from the start. When Henry Jennings arrived in Nassau in April 1716 commanding a more powerful force than Hornigold’s, the island’s pirate population split along lines that would define it until its destruction. Jennings had been a privateer in good standing and never entirely shed the instincts that came with it: he consistently refused to attack English vessels, and when the Crown offered a general pardon in 1717, he was among the first to consider taking it. Hornigold occupied an uneasy middle ground. Charles Vane represented the other pole entirely, the faction for whom Nassau was not a temporary refuge but a permanent alternative, and for whom the eventual pardon was a trap.14Several leading figures in the anti-pardon faction, including Vane, held Jacobite sympathies and hoped Nassau might serve as a base for a Stuart restoration; the collapse of the 1715 uprising had left a residue of politically motivated pirates whose opposition to Hanoverian authority was as much dynastic as economic (Woodard, 2007: 229–230). When copies of King George’s proclamation landed in Nassau in early 1718, distributed by the Bermuda governor’s own son, the settlement broke into two explicit camps almost immediately. The pro-pardon faction climbed to the top of Fort Nassau and raised the Union Jack. Vane’s men rushed the fort, pulled the flag down, and held the square (Woodard, 2007: 229–230). 

Still, what Nassau embodied, on land, was the extension of shipboard democracy into a functioning, if fragile, social order. The same principles that governed the pirate vessel (collective decision-making, elected leadership, rough equality in the distribution of resources) shaped life in the settlement. Even during the high tensions following the offer of royal pardon, Nassau’s pirates first attempted to resolve the situation by calling an (admittedly short-lived) general council meeting (Woodard, 2007: 231). More generally, pirates referred to each other as “the Brotherhood” and “Brother Pirate”; they showed consistent solidarity across crew lines, combining forces at sea and in port with crews they had never previously encountered (Rediker, 2004: 94–95). Some authorities feared, with good reason, that pirates might “set up a sort of Commonwealth” in the spaces beyond imperial reach—and Rediker notes they were “precisely correct in their designation” (Rediker, 2004: 31), if only provisionally. 

The threat that ‘Commonwealth’ posed was more than simply logistical. Pirates attacked merchant shipping, certainly, but what made Nassau genuinely intolerable to the emerging Atlantic order was the contagion it represented. The final push to destroy it was triggered not primarily by complaints from general merchants but, as Rediker documents, “in large measure as a response to demands by the increasingly powerful traders in West African slaves” (2004: 137). A series of mutinies had shaken the slave trade between 1716 and 1726; sailors aboard slave ships were reported to be “ripe for pyracy”. The proximity of an alternative social order, one that had abolished the wage, distributed resources equitably, and answered to no owner, was a standing invitation to the most exploited workers in the Atlantic system.  

The suppression of this symbol was deliberately theatrical. Woodes Rogers arrived at Nassau on July 20, 1718 with a royal commission combining the offer of pardon with the threat of force: a warship, a frigate, two sloops of war, and a transport carrying soldiers. Vane met him with a fireship and escaped. Some pirates scattered; most of those who remained took the pardon. But those who refused were tried and hanged. At the December 1718 mass execution Rogers arranged to fly the Jolly Roger above the gallows, so the skull looked down on the place of execution. He deployed a hundred soldiers, fearful of a rescue attempt by the assembled crowd, many of whom had been pirates themselves (Rediker, 2004: 11). The condemned did not perform the contrition that the occasion demanded. They made defiant speeches, “crying up a Pyrate’s Life to be the only Life for a Man of any Spirit”. Daniel Macarty acknowledged before the crowd that there was now “too much power over their heads” for anyone to intervene on his behalf—but the implication was clear: it had not always been so (Rediker, 2004: 11). The gallows were more than legal punishment. They were an argument, made in public, about who owned the Atlantic and on whose terms it would be organized. By 1726, following the dispersion and elimination of the Flying Gang and the recapture of New Providence Island by British authorities, “the maritime state had removed a major obstacle to the accumulation of capital in its ever-growing Atlantic system” (Rediker, 2004: 145). 

Expulsis Piratis, Commercia Restituta (“Pirates Expelled, Commerce Restored”), the official motto of the Bahamas until independence in 1973, encodes the political logic of that moment in four Latin words: the suppression of piracy in Nassau was the restoration of a specific economic order, constitutive to the wider politics of the Atlantic world. Linebaugh and Rediker’s concept of hydrarchy clarifies what was at stake: the suppression of piracy and the construction of the maritime state were aspects of the same process, imperial “hydrarchy from above” defining and defeating the sailors’ “hydrarchy from below” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 162, 172). The community of states that designated pirates as hostis humani generis was, in the same gesture, defining itself—as the legitimate holder of oceanic sovereignty, the guarantor of commercial circulation, the enforcer of property across jurisdictions. As Policante argues, the concept of the pirate as common enemy “obtained its meaning from” and “affirmed the existence of the concrete order of international law”15The logic this order instantiated has not disappeared: Policante traces a direct line from the persecutio piratarum to the War on Terror and contemporary global anti-piracy operations, in which the invocation of humanity against a common enemy continues to function as cover for what he calls “a coded global civil war” pursued through and behind international law (2015: 214). (2015: 130). 

The history of those years was first fixed in public narrative by A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson. General History drew on documentary records and what Woodard describes as “material clearly gathered from interviews with Woodes Rogers and other principals”—which is to say, it told the story of the Republic of Pirates from the perspective of the man who destroyed it, while presenting itself as a chronicle (Woodard, 2007: 333). It remained, as Woodard notes, the dominant account of the Bahamian pirates for nearly three centuries. The place it occupied in the shaping of the pirate myth is attended to in more detail in the following chapter. 

This is the historical and historiographical conjuncture that Black Sails takes as its point of departure. Set in the West Indies in the years immediately following Utrecht, the series stages piracy not as romance or aberration, but as a historically grounded challenge to an emerging global order. By centering the struggle over Nassau and the suppression of the Pirate Republic, Black Sails dramatizes the moment at which the freedoms of the ocean become intolerable and the transition from exception to law is violently enforced. The following chapters of this thesis examine how pirate narratives have historically functioned as political commentary, before turning to Black Sails as a work of historiophoty that intervenes in this tradition by reopening a revolutionary horizon that later narratives worked to close.

Notes
14
Several leading figures in the anti-pardon faction, including Vane, held Jacobite sympathies and hoped Nassau might serve as a base for a Stuart restoration; the collapse of the 1715 uprising had left a residue of politically motivated pirates whose opposition to Hanoverian authority was as much dynastic as economic (Woodard, 2007: 229–230).
15
The logic this order instantiated has not disappeared: Policante traces a direct line from the persecutio piratarum to the War on Terror and contemporary global anti-piracy operations, in which the invocation of humanity against a common enemy continues to function as cover for what he calls “a coded global civil war” pursued through and behind international law (2015: 214).

Part One  ·  Chapter III
Chapter III

The Ship of State

3.1  Truth convenient to none: fact and fiction

Black Sails concludes its final episode with the words “a story is true, a story is untrue”, spoken by the pirate Jack Rackham. “As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history” (XXXVIII). This functions as the show’s own statement of method: an acknowledgment that the history it has been dramatizing was never separable from the myths that grew from and around it simultaneously. This is a historical reality: as Plamen Arnaudov demonstrates in his doctoral study of witness accounts of colonial piracy, the mythmaking began as the events were unfolding. The “often gory truth about piratical acts, and about pirates themselves, was convenient to none”—and so, from the earliest court depositions through the published trial accounts and colonial correspondence of the early eighteenth century, what emerged was not transparent documentation but a body of texts shaped by competing and often irreconcilable agendas (Arnaudov, 2008: 32).

The practical stakes were immediate. Sailors accused of piracy needed to convince courts they had been pressed into service against their will. To do so, they had to construct the pirate villain convincingly—depicting their alleged captors as murderous, trigger-happy, beyond the pale of ordinary humanity. The deposition of one Owen Morris, for instance, describes Bellamy’s crew putting the matter of his release to vote, only to express themselves “in a Violent manner saying no, Dam him, they would first shoot him or Whip him to Death at the Mast” (cited in Arnaudov, 2008: 76). The irony is structural: in order to exonerate themselves, captured sailors reinforced and elaborated the very image of pirate ferocity that the authorities needed to justify the suppression. Many depositions fell, as Charles Johnson himself drily noted in his famous General History, within one of two categories: “a Heap of sly Insinuations, drawn from a known Fact” and “all Invention, and nothing true in it” (cited in Arnaudov, 2008: 76). The courts, the accused, the colonial administrators, and the reading public all had reasons to produce a particular kind of pirate; and out of these multiplicities of individual bias emerged “a portrayal of the pirate as a larger-than-life and highly ambivalent figure whose singularity makes him an attractive landing site for a number of cultural anxieties” (2008: 33).

The category of piracy was never purely legal to begin with. In the eighteenth century, it functioned as a concept useful for defining the line between legitimate and illegitimate commerce—a line that was, in practice, far from stable. In his Review for October 16, 1707, Daniel Defoe ironically catalogued the types of piracy central to English commercial institutions: 

It would make a sad Chasm on the Exchange of London, if all the Pyrates should be taken away from the Merchants there, whether we be understood to speak of your Litteral or Allegorical Pyrates; whether I should mean the Clandestine Trade Pyrates, who pyrate upon fair trade at home; the Custom-stealing Pyrates, who pyrate upon the Government; the Owling Pyrates, who rob the Manufactures; the privateering Pyrates, who rob by Law.  (Cited in Mackie, 2005: 29). 

Defoe’s irony worked in both directions: the trope of piracy could indict licensed commerce, and the language of legitimate commerce could be made to cover piratical accumulation. The period’s preoccupation with piracy and pirate stories was, as Mackie argues, “largely linked to the ways these are used to discursively rationalize and mobilize commercial imperialism” (2005: 29). The figure of the pirate was ideologically versatile precisely because the boundary it marked was unstable.

It is within this context that Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724) should be read, not simply as chronicle but as the text where these conflicting representational agendas converge most fully. Johnson published the first volume while Golden Age pirates were still active, drawing on trial documents, colonial correspondence, newspaper accounts, and, as Arnaudov establishes, a substantial quantity of rumor and invention (2008: 205). The book’s authorship remains contested: long attributed to Defoe, whose keen interest in piracy and stylistic fingerprints many scholars detected in it, the attribution has since been questioned by Furbank and Owens, and Marcus Rediker concludes that its author had “a deeper and more detailed knowledge of things maritime than Defoe could possibly have had” (2004: 179). What is not in question is the book’s immediate and lasting influence: it became the primary source for popular pirate histories well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the images it generated, pirates as simultaneously monstrous and heroic, have structured the cultural imaginary of piracy ever since. In his introduction to a 2010 reedition of General History, David Cordingly writes: “It has been said, and there seems no reason to question this, that Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates” (viii). Robert Louis Stevenson identified the book as a major influence, and even borrowed the name of his character Israel Hands (who also appears in Black Sails) from a list of Blackbeard’s crew which appeared in General History (Porterfield, 2003: 12). 

What Johnson had created was a text with a declared pedagogical purpose. His introduction announces the book’s intent to strike a “happy medium between enjoyment of ‘extravagance’ and condemnation of ‘mischief’”(cited in Arnaudov, 2008: 158)—a formulation that describes, in the author’s own terms, a calibrated public address: the pirate made entertaining, his transgression enjoyable, his threat contained. The readers of General History were, as Arnaudov observes, predominantly members of the rising middle class, precisely those “whose new wealth the law was designed to protect from such rogues as depicted in the collection”; and yet for many of them the pirate figure “struck chords of individualism, opportunism, and rapid upward class mobility which echoed essential middle-class values and aspirations” (2008: 23). Johnson’s solution to this tension was structural: demonization and glorification held in balance, the pirate available for vicarious identification without becoming available for political imitation.

The production of that balance had a specific material condition. As Woodard reconstructs, in 1722 or 1723 the book’s anonymous author approached Woodes Rogers seeking his help to fill in details of the pirate republic Rogers had suppressed, and Rogers apparently agreed, the text containing information only he could have provided (Woodard, 2007: 325). The text that “created the modern conception of pirates” was thus built, in part, from the perspective of the man whose explicit purpose was their elimination. This is not to say General History is simply Rogers’s apologia—it plainly is not, and its portrait of Nassau’s pirates is far more complex than official colonial correspondence allowed. But it does mean that the narrative frame within which Johnson organized his material, the pirate as spectacular outlaw whose rebellion against authority is thrilling precisely because it is doomed, bore the imprint of the suppressive archive at the moment of its conception. The same text that transmitted the pirates’ charisma across three centuries was produced in dialogue with the man whose Bahamian administration coined Expulsis Piratis, Commercia Restituta.

General History was an immediate international success: translated into Dutch, French, and German and republished across the Atlantic, it went through at least twenty editions in the decades following its first publication, several of the French editions advertising the stories of women pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read on their title pages (Rediker, 2004: 105). By the time Delacroix was composing Liberty Leading the People in late 1830, most of these editions “would have been available to the artist in Paris” (Rediker, 2004: 125); Rediker theorizes that the composition might have been inspired by a frontispiece illustration of one of them—a detail that measures, obliquely, how thoroughly Johnson’s pirates had saturated the cultural imagination of the Atlantic world within a century of their suppression. 

General History is remarkable precisely because it makes no attempt to resolve the contradictions it contains. Johnson called pirates “Marine Heroes, the Scourge of Tyrants and Avarice, and the brave Asserters of Liberty”—with sarcasm, Rediker notes, “but the implication was clear: many of his contemporaries held precisely this view” (Rediker, 2004: 173). Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman and major intellectual figure in Anglophone colonial America, battling the same popular image from the other direction, acknowledged that pirates were widely regarded as heroes: “Monsters, whom we dignify with the title of Hero’s” (Mather, cited in Rediker, 2004: 173). In the popular mind, the pirate was “not the common enemy of mankind but rather the freest of mankind” (Rediker, 2004: 173). The General History captured both of these impulses simultaneously, demonization and glorification “untroubled by their co-existence”, producing what Arnaudov shows to be a concentrated version of representational tendencies already present across the documentary archive (2008: 205).

This ambivalence was not a failure of the texts to arrive at the ‘truth’: it was the product of a genuine historical reality in which the pirate figure was available for multiple and incompatible kinds of ideological use, and in which no single account could monopolize the field. The stories that survived were the ones that proved useful: to colonial administrators justifying suppression, to sailors negotiating their own innocence, to a reading public hungry for figures who embodied anxieties about wealth, freedom, and the limits of legitimate authority. Black Sails inherits this tradition aware of what it is. The show positions itself explicitly as a prequel to Treasure Island, the nineteenth-century text that would eventually domesticate and fix these ambivalences into a single, politically legible fictional narrative—but it does so in order to subvert the imperialist master narrative of Stevenson’s novel. Before turning to that domestication and its subversion, however, this chapter must establish what made the ship itself such a charged site for this struggle.

3.2  A floating fragment of land

The ship of state is one of the oldest metaphors in Western political thought, appearing in Plato (Republic, Book VI 488a-489d) and recurring across centuries of political philosophy: the political community imagined as a vessel, its ruler as captain, its citizens as crew bound to obey if the ship is not to founder. Like most naturalized metaphors, it does ideological work, making hierarchy appear as practical necessity rather than historical construction. What this chapter argues is that in the Age of Sail, the metaphor becomes literal, and then eventually metaphorical again through the mythologization of the pirate we have retraced above. In early modern English law, the ship was literally a fragment of state territory, subject to the same feudal framework that governed relations on land. In our collective imaginary, pirate ships are “forever suspended in a highly-contested polysemic ambiguity”; calling back to Foucault, Policante argues that they “continue to be the greatest reserve of our political imagination” and “force us to think anew the fundamental categories of our political life in common” (2015: 215).

The titles of this chapter and this subsection borrow from this long metaphorical tradition, but the argument made is material. When Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of England, presided over two cases involving mutiny in 1615, he confronted a problem that English common law could not easily resolve: the sea was excluded from common law and Magna Carta, and yet the class relations aboard ships required legal regulation. His solution was to conceive of the ship as “a floating fragment of country land in the midst of the anomic sea”—a piece of English sovereign territory, subject to the same feudal framework that governed relations on land, with “merchant-captains filling the role of feudal masters, and sailors filling the role of servants and commoners” (Rubin 2006: 45-48). In that precise moment, the ship of state is not a metaphor. It is a legal instrument, a practical solution to the problem of how to maintain hierarchy in a space where no territorial authority could enforce it directly.

The conditions that made this legal fiction necessary also made it unstable. Eighteenth-century lexicographer and man of letters Samuel Johnson, whose contempt for the sailor’s life was well documented, observed that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned” (cited in Policante, 2015: 75). The comparison to a jail was more precise than Johnson may have intended. The ship was a “disciplinary machine, at the service of merchant capitalist practices”, a site of intensely concentrated labor discipline from which there was no exit, enclosed and hierarchical, its captain’s authority absolute and backed by law (Policante, 2015: 75). The military standardization of naval and merchant vessels produced “a micro-society that resembled tyranny in its purest form: ‘All that you are ordered to do is duty. […] All that you refuse to do is mutiny’” (Frykman et al., 2013: 3).

Interestingly, the colonial plantation worked by a similar logic. Erin Mackie has drawn the parallel systematically: both the ship and the West Indian plantation were “economically central but culturally alien to England”, both qualified as “total institutions” in which brutal labor discipline was enforced through isolation from everything familiar, and both required those who entered them to be “socialized anew”—stripped of prior attachments, languages, and customs, and subjected to a new set of social and labor relations (Mackie, 2005: 47, 32). “The world of the ship, like that of the West Indian plantation, was a ‘world apart’, foreign and often incomprehensible to outsiders” (2005: 47). On board, the sailor lived, like the African slave, in a state of “virtual incarceration” (Rediker, cited in Mackie, 2005: 47). The comparison is institutional rather than experiential: it identifies shared technologies and logics of discipline, extraction and enclosure without collapsing the legal, racial, and ontological violence of chattel slavery into wage-dependent maritime labor. The structural connection between these two institutions—the floating factory and the plantation factory—is not incidental. They were the twin engines of Atlantic capitalism, bound together by the same circuits of commodity, labor, and violence. This connection is directly relevant to the resolution of the plot of Black Sails in its fourth and final season, and is examined further in Chapter 6. 

The ship was therefore the site on which the system’s contradictions most visibly erupted. “Maritime radicalism”, the ensemble of actions challenging prevailing relations of power at sea, operated on three connected levels: the ship itself as a social and political unit, the nation-state that formulated and enforced maritime law, and the system of international capitalism within which both operated (Frykman et al., 2013: 7). Sailors ran, petitioned, grumbled, struck, and mutinied. They devised the round robin—a protest instrument in which signatories wrote their names in a circle so no one could be identified as ringleader—as a form of collective action that directly mimicked and challenged the captain’s sovereign authority (2013: 7). In 1768, sailors in London damaged the rigging of their ships in acts of sabotage, then “struck” the sails, forcing commerce to a halt—and in doing so added the word strike to the English language (2013: 7). The ship was thus one of the main sites where class conflict played out, at times in its most concentrated and consequential forms.

The pirate ship reorganized this politics rather than simply inverting it. When sailors seized a merchant vessel through mutiny or capture, they did not establish the captain’s tyranny in a new guise—they dissolved it, replacing it with the democratic articles, elected leadership, and collective decision-making discussed in Chapter 2. The pirate ship was a “floating space of exception” that stood against the “floating fragments of state-territory” of the legitimate fleet (Policante, 2015: 86)—not exactly escaping the political logic of the ship, but instead recapturing it, and modeling an alternative. Linebaugh and Rediker’s formulation is exact: “hydrarchy from below was a deadly enemy to hydrarchy from above, as pirates had ruptured the middle passage” (2000: 172). 

This is the historical reality that pirate narratives have always been negotiating—from Johnson’s ambivalent General History through to the nineteenth-century romance tradition that would work to contain it. When Loraine Fletcher, reading Treasure Island as a literary text, observes that the Hispaniola is “not just a ship but a ship of state” (2007: 40), her conclusion converges with the historical argument this chapter has assembled from an entirely different direction: in pirate narratives, the ship is the argument. How it is organized, who commands it, and on whose terms—these are questions about the social order, not just about seamanship. Black Sails places this recognition at its center, staging the struggle over Nassau as a struggle over which kind of ship— and which kind of world—will survive. In order to do so, it chooses Treasure Island as its source text, precisely because the novel is haunted by these questions.

3.3  Recovering the pirate: from imperial boyhood to Marxist rejoinder

What happened to the ambivalent, politically volatile figure that emerged from the witness accounts and trial records of the Golden Age? Over the course of the nineteenth century, it was domesticated. The pirate romance genre that consolidated in the Victorian period did more than simply entertain; it performed, as Bradley Deane has shown in his analysis of late-Victorian boys’ adventure fiction, the ideological work of what he calls the “imperial play ethic”—a fusion of perpetual boyhood and imperial aggression in which piracy’s political content was stripped away and its energy redirected toward the naturalization of empire (Deane, 2011: 689–693). Where earlier in the century the boy hero and the pirate had functioned as moral opposites (the virtuous youth of England set against the transgressive outlaw) after Treasure Island they became “doubles rather than antitheses”: the pirate’s daring and contempt for authority were repackaged as boyish qualities, and boyish qualities were repackaged as imperial ones (2011: 693). The result was a genre in which adventure naturalized domination, where the capacity for violence that had made the historical pirate genuinely threatening became a thrilling game, and where the questions the existence of the historical pirate had posed were dissolved into the pleasures of the plot.

This was not simply a cultural drift. Nineteenth-century pirate tales were, as Monica Cohen has argued in her study of Stevenson’s sources, already engaged with questions of intellectual property, authorship, and commerce—with the boundaries between theft and borrowing, between legitimate accumulation and piracy in the broader sense (Cohen, 2013: 153). They “anticipate, rehearse, and critique British colonial and imperial projects” (2013: 153), operating in full awareness of the ideological terrain they occupied. The pirate figure’s mobility—available for demonization and romanticization simultaneously, as we saw earlier in this chapter—made it peculiarly useful for a genre that needed to make imperial violence feel like adventure rather than like what it was. The contemporary reception of Treasure Island confirms that this ideological function was legible to its first readers. Writing in 1899, at the onset of the South African war, the British critic E. H. Mullin described the novel as an “English epic, couched in modern form”, which had restored readers’ “faith in [their] own powers, and those of the nation, to cope with both domestic and foreign difficulties”, and which had prepared them for the “overt jingoism of Kipling’s adventure fiction” (cited in Ward, 1974: 313). In the competent, level-headed Allan Quatermain of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), literary historian Hayden W. Ward identifies Jim Hawkins (the main character of Treasure Island) grown into “a white hunter and explorer, a carrier of the white man’s burden” (1974: 313): Treasure Island had generated a genre, and the genre was self-aware of its own purpose.

Stevenson’s novel emerges thus as the pivot on which this transformation turned, and it repays close reading as such. The Hispaniola (the ship at the story’s center) is, Loraine Fletcher argues in her sustained political reading of the novel, an allegory for the acute socio-political conflict the author lived during, akin to the farm in Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) (2007: 34). The cabin party—Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and Captain Smollett—represent Britain’s ruling class in its several dimensions: feudal landownership, the professional classes, and the armed forces. The crew are “dogs”, their subhumanity “constantly reiterated”, and the mutiny they stage represents, in Fletcher’s reading, the threat of working-class revolt as imagined by a “romantic conservative” alarmed by the circulation of Marx and Engels’ publications and the growing influence of working men’s political organizations in the Northern industrial cities (2007: 34). Long John Silver, the mutiny’s leader and most charismatic figure (and Black Sails’ deuteragonist), “bears the same relation to the crew of the Hispaniola, from a conservative’s point of view, as Marx bears to England’s working men” (2007: 40). Treasure Island, in this view, is a “rejoinder to Marx’s political philosophy” (2007, 34): its resolution—the cabin party crushing the mutinous crew, the restoration of the Hispaniola to her rightful owners— renaturalizes the hierarchy the historical pirate ship had demonstrated could be organized otherwise. Fletcher’s conclusion is worth quoting directly: this is “perhaps the most successfully coercive children’s story in English” (2007: 45). The coercion works through the adventure rather than alongside it: as Fletcher observes, “boys’ adventure story and condition-of-England analysis flow seamlessly into each other”, so that “the casual or child reader will develop loyalties and prejudices along with him as they read” (2007: 45). The lesson is delivered inside the pleasure of the plot, which is precisely what makes it so effective.

If Fletcher finds the ideology of Empire and capitalism in this story, Marah Gubar’s reading, in her chapter on Treasure Island in Artful Dodgers (2009), accounts for the contradictions the novel cannot quite suppress in defending that ideology. Gubar argues that Treasure Island is not straightforwardly an imperial adventure story but an anti-adventure story: rather than inspiring young readers to seek wealth and glory abroad, Stevenson depicts the treasure hunt as “terrifying, traumatizing, and ethically problematic” (Gubar, 2009: 70). Jim Hawkins does not volunteer for the expedition, he is conscripted into it by a succession of adults who deploy him as an instrument of their own purposes. He expresses no boyish enthusiasm for going to sea; from the novel’s first pages he is frightened, and when he finally sees the treasure, his description dwells not on its romance but on its cost: “what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled in the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell” (Stevenson, cited in Gubar, 2009: 73). The novel ends not in triumph but in nightmare: Jim will not return to the island, and the parrot’s cry of “Pieces of eight” still wakes him from sleep. The treasure is not worth it, and the novel, even as it argues in favor of the system that produces the treasure, on some level, knows this.

A text can perform ideological containment and still preserve traces of the antagonism it contains. Fletcher and Gubar are not contradictory readings. They describe two different registers in which the same text operates simultaneously: the ideological argument the novel makes consciously, and the costs that argument cannot fully contain. This is the structure of what Fredric Jameson describes in The Political Unconscious (1981) as the characteristic operation of cultural texts produced under capitalism: the ideological work a text performs is most legible precisely in what it works hardest to suppress. The political content of historical Golden Age piracy—the challenge to hierarchy, the democratic proof of concept—is not actually absent from Treasure Island. It appears in the nightmares, in the cost of the hunt, in the mutiny and in Silver’s unarguable charisma, in all the places the novel registers what it is arguing against. 

Black Sails positions itself explicitly as a prequel to Treasure Island: its events lead toward the novel’s starting point—the series’ premise promises, at first glance, to tell the viewer the story of how Flint came to possess his infamous treasure, and how it ended up buried on Skeleton Island. It does so in order to tackle similar questions about power and Empire as the novel, albeit from the opposite direction. The show reads the novel against the grain of its own containment. If Stevenson writes a “rejoinder to Marx’s political philosophy”, the show is a rejoinder to the rejoinder, reiterating not just a Marxist reading of the Golden Age of Piracy—after all, Stevenson also acknowledges the reality of class—but a commitment to revolutionary conclusions. Working men are not dogs—they are soldiers drafted in a war against Empire and Capital.

Where Treasure Island ends with the restoration of hierarchy and Jim’s submission to the “authority which comfortably owns not just the law but the history and culture of his country” (Fletcher, 2007: 35), Black Sails begins with the question of whether that outcome was inevitable. Where the novel paints Silver’s populist charisma as conniving, deceiving honest young boys, the show takes its political implications seriously and follows them where they lead. What makes this intervention formally distinctive is not simply that it reverses Stevenson’s ideological commitments, but that it does so by adapting not a single source text but what Swaminathan calls a “transcoded mosaic” (2018: 141): a broad cultural and historical context (Johnson’s General History, Rediker’s scholarship, the tradition of pirate romance, the political horizon of the Republic of Pirates) translated into a narrative framework that makes those contested materials speak directly to the present16Watching the supplemental material to the show leaves one with the impression that the trajectory that the pirate myth undertook is understood by cast and crew alike. “Treasure Island itself isn’t factually accurate about how pirates lived. It was plucked from a lot of different worlds,” says actor Toby Schmitz for example, who plays Rackham. “It was gossip that made its way back from the Caribbean to London. It was often sensationalized to sell papers” (Season 2 DVD Bonus).. The show, in a sense, reopens the archive. In it, Captain Flint is not a colorful villain but a man who has read the history; who understands, as he puts it in the series finale, exactly how the system that will defeat them operates, as well as his place in it, and what his existence threatens:

This is how they survive. […] They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility—there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. XXXVIII, 38:08–39:12

The “dark” Flint names here is not criminality but the space outside imperial narration: the same space where piracy had once appeared as monstrosity to ‘civilized’ society, and where Black Sails now locates political possibility. Crucially, the mechanism of imperial othering he identifies is didactic: a simplified black and white world where good and evil are clear-cut, and fear guides one’s choices. A childish understanding of the world—in sum, the worldview of a boys’ adventure novel. 

Notes
16
Watching the supplemental material to the show leaves one with the impression that the trajectory that the pirate myth undertook is understood by cast and crew alike. “Treasure Island itself isn’t factually accurate about how pirates lived. It was plucked from a lot of different worlds,” says actor Toby Schmitz for example, who plays Rackham. “It was gossip that made its way back from the Caribbean to London. It was often sensationalized to sell papers” (Season 2 DVD Bonus).
Part Two  ·  Chapter IV
Chapter IV  ·  Part Two

Of Monsters and Men

If there is a ghost haunting Empire today, this is undoubtedly the ghost of a pirate.

— Amadeo Policante, The Pirate Myth (2015)
4.1  Breaking the frame: sociocultural context

The pirate, as the previous chapter established, has never been a stable figure. Politically volatile from the moment the mythmaking began, available simultaneously for demonization and romanticization, this figure has always risked escaping whatever frame was built to contain it. The Victorian domestication that culminated in Treasure Island managed this instability, redirecting the pirate’s threatening charge into the safe channels of boys’ adventure, imperial romance, and individualized greed. What Policante calls the figure’s “exceptional semantic instability” persisted underneath, available to be re-made explicit whenever the frame cracked (2015: 215). This persistence is visible across wildly different contemporary contexts: One Piece, Eiichiro Oda’s manga series following a boy who dreams of becoming ‘King of the Pirates’, has been in continuous serialization since 1997 and has over 600 million copies in circulation worldwide, making it the best-selling comic series ever produced by a single author; while pirate flags have become a recurring presence at political protests across the globe, repurposed as symbols of rebellion and refusal in contexts that have nothing to do with the Caribbean.

The twentieth century largely kept the frame intact. Hollywood’s swashbuckler tradition, from Douglas Fairbanks through Errol Flynn, continued the Victorian project of making the pirate heroic, masculine, and apolitical—adventure for its own sake, violence in the service of romance rather than resistance. By the 1980s and 1990s the genre had exhausted itself: Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986) and Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island (1995) were both expensive failures, and the pirate film was widely considered a dead commercial proposition (Zhanial, 2018: 189). It was Disney that revived it. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) generated enormous profits and reset the popular image of the pirate for a new generation, doing so through a figure—Captain Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp—who was simultaneously a pastiche of every pirate who had come before him and a parody of all of them (including Treasure Island’s very own Long John Silver). As Susanne Zhanial argues in her analysis of the franchise, Jack Sparrow is neither a straightforward descendant of the Byronic anti-hero nor of Hollywood’s swashbuckler but a “double-coded text” that can be read as ironic commentary on the pirate genre or enjoyed as straightforward entertainment without recognizing the references at all (Zhanial, 2018: 198). The political content that the Victorian romance had already stripped from the figure was now so thoroughly absent that its absence had become the joke. Scholars writing about the franchise at the time of its release noted that the renewed fascination with pirates seemed to reflect contemporary anxieties about the erosion of state power and the rise of corporate and private actors (Dawdy and Bonni, 2012); what E. Johanna Hartelius identifies as a cultural moment in which “declining governmental power and growing corporate influence” made the figure of the pirate newly resonant (2007: 155). The irony was that the most visible expression of this renewed fascination was itself a product of one of the largest corporations in the world, and engaged those anxieties not by politicizing the pirate but by turning the figure into a vehicle for spectacle and franchise revenue.

The pirate revival that Pirates of the Caribbean inaugurated did not stop with film. The decade that followed produced a substantial body of popular culture set in the Golden Age—novels, games, television series—saturated with the imagery and iconography of early eighteenth-century Caribbean piracy. The videogame Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), set on the same historical terrain as Black Sails and incorporating several of the same historical figures, sold over eleven million copies. Nassau appears in both as the pirates’ utopian republic, and both engage the history of its suppression. But where Black Sails treats Nassau as a political project, AC4 integrates it into a fantasy of individual heroism and aesthetic spectacle, the idealism of pirate democracy subordinated to the demands of gameplay and franchise worldbuilding. The historical content is there; the political argument is not.17The intervening decades between Treasure Island’s cultural consolidation and the PotC revival are beyond the scope of this thesis to trace in full. It is worth noting, however, that the pirate’s migration into children’s entertainment during the mid-twentieth century (exemplified by the fifty-plus screen adaptations of Treasure Island itself, including a Muppets version (1996) and a Disney science fiction retelling (Treasure Planet, 2002)) further consolidated the domestication Chapter 3 describes, removing the figure even further from the political terrain it had once occupied.

Black Sails premiered on the American cable network Starz in January 2014, the same year AC4 was still at the height of its commercial success. From the outset, it inhabited a different register entirely. The show belongs to what television scholars have come to call the second Golden Age of American television: the wave of prestige, serialized drama that emerged in the late 1990s with The Sopranos and accelerated through the 2000s and early 2010s (Thompson, 1996: 13), characterized by long-form narrative, large ensemble casts, morally complex protagonists, and production values previously associated with film rather than television (Mittell, 2006; Thomspon, 1996). The format is perhaps as important as the content itself: serialized television’s capacity for what Jason Mittell calls “narrative complexity” (2006: 29)—the slow accumulation of character development, political education, and thematic elaboration across multiple seasons—gave Black Sails’ creators space to make arguments that neither film nor episodic television could sustain. The pirate crew’s development of collective consciousness, which is this chapter’s central subject, requires four seasons to dramatize; the historiographical argument the show makes about the suppression of the Republic of Pirates requires the viewer to have lived with these characters long enough to feel, not just understand, what was foreclosed.

The dominant mode of prestige television in this period was not, however, political radicalism. Game of Thrones (2011–2019), the most commercially successful prestige drama of the era and Black Sails’ most obvious generic contemporary, made a virtue of moral nihilism: power was the only currency, idealism a form of naivety punished by narrative, cynicism the marker of sophistication. This was not an aberration but a tendency; what critics of the genre identified as “grimdark” (Carroll, 2018: 3), the collapse of moral ambiguity into an implicit conservatism in which nothing changes and no one is redeemed. Black Sails emerged from the same televisual moment and shared its formal characteristics—the complex protagonist, the unflinching violence, the serialized slow burn—while making a quite different ideological choice. Understanding this choice requires attending to the specific historical moment in which the show was produced.

Black Sails aired between 2014 and 2017. These were years in which the political vocabulary of the post-2008 financial crisis had entered mainstream discourse in ways that would have seemed implausible a decade earlier: anti-capitalist politics, the language of class and collective action, the insistence that the system itself rather than individual failures was the problem. When Jeremy Corbyn quoted the final stanza of Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy “ye are many, they are few” at Glastonbury in June 2017 it was not an eccentric literary gesture but a recognizable political language, one that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic had spent several years relearning. The same years saw Black Lives Matter emerge as a political force in the U.S., insisting on the centrality of racial violence to American political life in ways that made a show committed to taking seriously both the motley crew’s multiracial solidarity and the limits of that solidarity newly legible to its audience.

The show was made within conditions that impose their own constraints. It was commercial television, produced for a cable network with specific commercial interests, written largely by a team that was majority white and American, financed and distributed within the structures of the same entertainment industry that produced Pirates of the Caribbean. The Jamesonian framework this thesis brings to the show—reading cultural production for what it knows and what it does not know it knows, for the contradictions it contains as much as for the arguments it makes consciously—is precisely calibrated for this situation. A text produced within commercial popular culture can make arguments that exceed its conditions of production; its ideological limitations are as analytically productive as its insights. The following sections therefore turn to what Black Sails does achieve within those limits: its reconstruction of the pirate as a political subject, and its exposure of Empire itself as the true monstrous force.

Notes
17
The intervening decades between Treasure Island’s cultural consolidation and the PotC revival are beyond the scope of this thesis to trace in full. It is worth noting, however, that the pirate’s migration into children’s entertainment during the mid-twentieth century (exemplified by the fifty-plus screen adaptations of Treasure Island itself, including a Muppets version (1996) and a Disney science fiction retelling (Treasure Planet, 2002)) further consolidated the domestication Chapter 3 describes, removing the figure even further from the political terrain it had once occupied.
4.2  The stuff of nightmares: the Pirate as the Monster

The inversion at the heart of Black Sails is announced before the opening credits of its first episode. A British merchantman has been seized by Flint’s crew; the captured sailors are assembled on deck. It is not Flint who addresses them but a crewman named Singleton:

Know this: now that the fight is over, you have nothing more to fear from us today. Because we know this fight was not of your making. It was the choice of our true enemy, your true enemy—the tyrant captain. Many of us once sailed on a ship like this one. We know what it is to be slaves to his whim, his violence, his shit wages, his insufferable stupidity. So we’ve made for ourselves a different life, where we don’t rely on wages: we own a stake. And where our pleasure isn’t a sin, it’s a virtue. We also know what it’s like to see our brothers die in the service of no end other than a tyrant’s pride. (I, 9:26-10:26)

 

The show’s political vocabulary is established in its first ten minutes: wage labor as a form of slavery, the pirate ship as a collective alternative, the “tyrant captain” as the real enemy. This is not background texture: the narrative is explicitly stating its central conflict.

Fifty minutes into the same episode, Flint addresses his crewmate Billy Bones: 

When a king brands us pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries. He doesn’t mean to make us criminals. He means to make us monsters. For that’s the only way his god-fearing, tax-paying subjects can make sense of men who keep what is theirs and fear no one. When I say there’s a war coming, I don’t mean with the Scarborough. I don’t mean with King George or England.  Civilization is coming. And it means to exterminate us. (I, 50:24-50:57)

 

 

Flint identifies the monster designation as an ideological operation: a way of making the existence of men who refuse the terms of imperial society incomprehensible to those within it, and therefore justifiable to eliminate. This is, as Policante demonstrates in his genealogy of the pirate myth, the precise function the figure of the pirate has always served in imperial legal and political discourse: the designation of an enemy outside the law makes the violence deployed against them appear not as political conflict but as the enforcement of a natural, universal order against those who supposedly have placed themselves beyond humanity (Policante, 2015). Flint understands the mechanism of his own dehumanization, and says so plainly.

What makes this more than a statement of grievance is what the viewer learns in Season 2. The flashback sequences that reveal Flint’s history as Lieutenant James McGraw establish that he understood this mechanism before it was deployed against him; that he grasped it analytically, from inside the system, while he was still a serving officer of the Crown. Watching a public execution of pirates with Thomas Hamilton, McGraw observes that “civilization needs its monsters” (IX, 23:08). The dramatic irony is significant: this is the man who will become the most feared pirate of his generation, explaining to his lover the ideological purpose of the spectacle they are watching together. He is not yet a monster, but he already knows how monsters are made.18It is tempting at first to wonder if his astuteness partially comes from this remove, from the privileged position of onlooker from which one has the luxury to observe and analyze—but multiple pirates from different backgrounds later express similar thoughts, the narrative thus refusing the idea that the oppressed need to be taught how to identify the mechanisms of their own oppression. This thread is developed further in the following chapter of this thesis. The show thereby refuses the reading of Flint’s politics as mere reaction, as the inevitable rage of a wronged man, and establishes them instead as a conscious political understanding that precedes his own designation.

That designation, when it comes, is performed publicly and with theatrical deliberateness. In Episode XVII, a court official presides over the execution of captured pirate Charles Vane in Nassau, delivering a speech that reads as the official text of the monster narrative: 

Men who are not men at all, but beasts governed by the base instinct, incapable of anything but the most primal behaviors.  A constant threat to every decent, God-fearing citizen among us.  As long as those men roam free, strife will endure, fear will abound, and progress will elude us.  Today marks the silencing of the most disruptive of those voices and a step towards the return of civilization in Nassau.  But we must always remember however strong the need for the removal of these traitors, these relics of a more savage age, there is no relish in this moment, but there is righteousness and comfort in the knowledge that God’s will be done again in Nassau. (XXVII, 43:36-44:40) 

 

 

The language is precise: the pirates are not criminals, who retain legal personhood, but beasts, who do not. The violence enacted against them is not punishment but purification; the restoration of civilization against savagery, of God’s order against animal disorder. This is imperial ideology performing itself at full volume, and the show stages it as performance: the gallows as theatre, the crowd as audience, the condemned as props in a story they did not write.

The lexical field reached for here is not incidental. It is the vocabulary of colonial ideology, the same discourse that organized European imperial expansion as a civilizing mission: the mission civilisatrice in its French formulation, but the logic was common to all the major imperial powers. As Policante demonstrates, the designation of non-European peoples as pirates, savages, or enemies of natural law served a consistent function in colonial legal thought; it placed them outside the protections that governed relations between legitimate political communities, making the violence deployed against them appear not as conquest but as administration, not as war but as law enforcement. “They ‘civilized’, they ‘administered punishments’, they ‘enforced international or even natural law’, they ‘protected humanity’ from the monstrous practices of the barbarians” (2015: 159). Once the other is designated a monster rather than an enemy, all limits to the violence used against them dissolve. 

What the court official’s speech works to make visible is that this logic was applied not only to colonized peoples but also to the maritime proletariat—or rather, that the distinction between the two was never as stable as imperial ideology required. The pirate crews of Nassau were, as Chapter 2 established, multiracial: escaped slaves, dispossessed sailors, indentured workers, men from across the Atlantic world who had been most thoroughly stripped of everything by the same system. Colonial authorities understood that a major part of what made piracy dangerous beyond the loss of capital was the standing demonstration that those whom racial capitalism had divided could recognize common interest and organize collectively. The dehumanizing language deployed against pirates thus did double ideological work: it justified their elimination while simultaneously reinforcing the racial boundaries their existence threatened. Later this logic would be flipped around, and the genocidal violence enacted on the colonized could be justified through the language of the war against piracy:19This is not to suggest a one-on-one equivalency as the violence enacted against pirates was eliminatory but not ethnically motivated, but the othering inherent to the criminalization of piracy echoes racial logics that would underlie colonial violence. For more on this see Policante (2015). Sir James Brooke, who would come to eventually be known as the White Rajah of Sarawak, claimed that nobody would object to him turning the Sarebas people of Borneo into “mincemeat” by explaining “They are pirates, and this must justify all I have done, and more in the eyes of reasonable men” (Layton 2011: 94). This 19th century example demonstrates the portability of the pirate category within imperial violence. To call pirates beasts was thus to place them alongside the enslaved and the colonized in the category of those for whom civilization’s violence required no justification. The show’s fictional pirates are not oblivious to this. Billy Bones, returning from English captivity, recounts in horror: “we aren’t criminals to them. We aren’t even men. We’re animals” (XIV, 45:55-46:10).

The circuit completes itself in Episode XVIII, where Prosecutor Kensington addresses Flint at trial: “you stand before this court accused of wreaking untold havoc throughout the New World, of clawing at the very fabric of civilization that holds us together with malice and without regret” (XVIII, 21:10-21:46). The administrative register of the evidence Kensington advances—affidavits, testimonials, insurance petitions—is the monster narrative in its legal form, bureaucratic and therefore seemingly neutral. Flint’s response is the show’s most compressed statement of piracy as a conscious choice of resistance: “everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it” (XVIII, 22:39-23:03). This is not capitulation but a kind of semantic sleight of hand: taking the label and redirecting it. If the monster is what stands against civilization’s violence, then Flint will shoulder that designation. 

 

It is worth pausing on the first scene of the first episode before moving forward. The seizure of the British merchantman that opens Black Sails is shot exactly as the genre demands: African percussions, eerie soundtrack, animalistic sounds emerging from fog, the pirates invisible until they are suddenly everywhere, the violence of the armed clash gory and overwhelming. Flint’s first appearance is him uncovering his face—he has been wearing a litham, a mouth-cloth whose associations are unmistakably racial—and his crew are marked with war paint. Every visual code the viewer has been trained to read as savage, as other, as monstrous, is present and legible.

 

This imagery never appears again in the show. Not once across thirty-seven subsequent episodes does Black Sails return to this visual vocabulary. It is deployed in the opening sequence and permanently retired—which means it was never the show’s language, but the viewer’s. The show opens by giving the audience exactly what the monster narrative had taught them to expect, and then spends four seasons refusing to deliver it again. The first scene is a trap, and its purpose is diagnostic: to show the viewer what assumptions they carried into the room, so that the work of dismantling those assumptions can begin.


Notes
18
It is tempting at first to wonder if his astuteness partially comes from this remove, from the privileged position of onlooker from which one has the luxury to observe and analyze—but multiple pirates from different backgrounds later express similar thoughts, the narrative thus refusing the idea that the oppressed need to be taught how to identify the mechanisms of their own oppression. This thread is developed further in the following chapter of this thesis.
19
This is not to suggest a one-on-one equivalency as the violence enacted against pirates was eliminatory but not ethnically motivated, but the othering inherent to the criminalization of piracy echoes racial logics that would underlie colonial violence. For more on this see Policante (2015).
4.3  Civilization is coming: Empire as the Monster

The show’s argument about imperial violence is not that Empire is cruel in an exceptional or aberrant way. It is that the violence is structural: that it operates across a spectrum from the spectacular to the administrative to the legal, and that what makes it most effective is precisely the capacity to render most of that spectrum invisible. The torture chamber and the debt collector are the same system. The gallows and the dismissal letter are the same system. Making that legible is one of the most consistent things Black Sails does across its four seasons. Steinberg states this as central in the DVD Bonus to Season 2: “the theme that’s underlying is about that understanding of what civilization really is, and how uncivilized civilization can be”. 

The clearest entry point into this argument is also the most personal. The backstory revealed in Season 2 establishes that before he was Captain Flint, James McGraw was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy—educated, decorated, and working alongside the aristocrat Thomas Hamilton on a genuine reformist project to establish Nassau as a stable British colony under humane governance. What destroyed him was not battle or crime but the revelation of his romantic relationship with Hamilton. The consequences were entirely legal: discharge from the Navy, Hamilton committed to an asylum, both men’s reputations annihilated by Hamilton’s father through the careful management of the official story. No blood was shed. The violence was administrative—a meeting, a dismissal, a signature on a commitment order—and it was total. The man who would become the most feared pirate of his generation was made, not born, by institutions operating exactly as they were designed to. The monster was produced in a drawing room in London.

This matters for the show’s argument because it collapses the distinction between the violence Empire deploys against its designated enemies and the violence it deploys against its ‘own’. The same system that hangs pirates in public squares and calls them beasts destroyed McGraw through paperwork. The difference is not in the nature of the violence but in its visibility. What Billy Bones articulates after his capture and torture by English authorities is the experience of moving from one register to the other—from the invisible to the spectacular—and finding them continuous: 

Have you ever been tortured? Suffered pain applied by men who saw you as less than a man? Saw you as an animal? ‘Cause it isn’t actually the pain they’re inflicting that’s the most frightening part of it. It isn’t the fear of future pain. It’s the knowledge that even when the pain stops, even if they were to let you go, that they’ve changed you. That pain, that fear, that despair... has made you someone else, someone you barely recognize. Against your will. (XV, 30:35-32:55)

 

 

The dehumanization Billy describes is the same logic the court official in Episode XXVII deploys from the podium, now experienced from inside the body it acts upon.

The show’s most sustained engagement with the structural, invisible end of the spectrum comes through individual biography. Jack Rackham’s speech to Woodes Rogers in Episode XXVI is worth quoting at length because it does something that borders on microhistory—it makes the process of dispossession legible through a single life: 

My father was a tailor in Leeds.  As was his father and his father’s father. Time was if a man on the Avondale Road asked where he might find the finest clothes in northern England, he was pointed toward the shop of a man named Rackham. Then the men who sell wool decide they’d prefer not to compete with the men who imported fine cotton. And as the men who sell wool have the ears of the men who make laws, an embargo is enacted to increase profits and calico disappears. And my father’s business that he inherited from his father and his father’s father begins to wither and die. And my father suffers the compound shame of financial failure seen through the eyes of his son and descended into drink. I’d sit beside him as a boy at the Sunday service as he shouted at the pastor, at the altar—at anyone who’d listen, really—at the injustice of it all. And I’d put my arm over his shoulder as the insults began, help carry him out of the church. God, the insults. At his funeral, our neighbors were kind enough to whisper them rather than call them out loud. So, I set to work, determined to rebuild what had been taken away. I was 13 years old. But I was determined... until a man arrived at my door claiming to hold debts belonging to my father. Debts accumulated as my father drank. Debts he claimed that now belonged to me. Debts I could not possibly have hoped to repay. Debts over which this man would have seen me imprisoned—imprisoned in a place where the debts would have been discharged only through hard labor. Hard labor with no wages, working at—wait for it—the production of textiles. (XXVI, 26:38-29:33)

 

The circularity is the point: the embargo that destroyed the Rackham family’s textile business produced a boy who would have been forced into textile labor to pay for the consequences of that destruction. Rackham names here the totalizing way in which economic violence is enacted, not just starving his family but making his father ill and turning him into a pariah. This is Rediker’s argument about the making of the maritime proletariat rendered as personal narrative: the dispossession of artisan families by legislative capture, the conversion of the dispossessed into wage laborers or debtors, the whole process masked by the language of legitimate commerce and legal obligation. Rackham was not born a pirate: Calico Jack is the product of the same system that now condemns him. The show makes Rackham deliver this speech directly to Rogers, the representative of legitimate imperial authority, while facing execution, which means it is also a refusal of the terms on which that authority judges him. He mockingly quotes Rogers back at himself: “‘You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is’ says the man to whom the world handed everything”.

Eleanor Guthrie’s account of her grandfather’s success in Episode XXX illuminates the same process from the other direction: she calls him a “pirate of another sort” and explains that “plunder purchased more ships. Ships generated more profits, profits became wealth, which became influence, which became power. By the time I was born, my grandfather was one of the wealthiest men in the New World” (XXX, 09:40-10:14). The Guthrie fortune, the legitimate commercial empire that Eleanor has inherited and that underpins Nassau’s trading economy, was built from exactly the same violence for which pirates are criminalized. When Eleanor eventually gets arrested and tried for her complicity in pirate commerce, a character observes to Eleanor with a precision that cuts through Nassau’s entire social mythology that the difference between her and the daughters of London fortunes is that “their families had better lawyers” (XX, 07:40-08:18). Legitimate wealth and piratical plunder are the same accumulation; what distinguishes them is access to legal instruments of protection and narration.

The show’s most daring statement of what this system requires and what Nassau therefore threatens comes from Rogers himself. Negotiating with a Spanish colonial official in Episode XXXIII, he lays out the stakes with complete clarity: 

My enemy has remade itself, made allies with an army of maroons, and has now dedicated itself to disorder of the grandest scale. Inciting others... slaves, sailors, wage laborers alike... to join their fight and give their lives to destroy the civilized world. Labor fuels commerce and commerce fuels security. If these people are successful in compromising the first, there is no end to the damage they can cause the rest. (XXXIII, 34:57-37:03)

 

This quote is remarkable in several ways. Rogers does not frame Nassau as a criminal nuisance or even a political threat in narrow national terms; he frames it as a threat to the labor regime that underpins the entire Atlantic economy. Slaves, sailors, and wage laborers are named together as a single potential force—the motley crew, now articulated as such by the man whose job is to prevent them from recognizing their common interest. And he makes this argument to a Spanish colonial official, explicitly asking him to set aside national enmity in the name of their shared investment in maintaining that labor regime. This is, as Policante argues, the precise logic by which the criminalization of piracy produced the first articulation of transnational ruling-class interest: the community of states that designated pirates as hostis humani generis simultaneously constituting itself as a class, defining its common interest against those who threatened the foundations of Atlantic capitalism (2015: 80). The show puts this argument in the mouth of its villain in plain language, addressed to a foreign power, in a private negotiation. 

As it paints Empire as monstrous, the show in the same brushstroke humanizes the pirate-monster. One of the central subplots of Season 2 is the return of Abigail Ashe after her kidnapping to her father Lord Peter Ashe, governor of the Carolina Colony. Abigail arrives in Nassau as the show’s most legible representative of the imperial narrative—not a soldier or an administrator but a young woman raised entirely within it, whose knowledge of the world she is traversing comes from the stories she was told across an ocean. During her voyage back aboard the Walrus, she learns that the pirates are made of flesh and blood just like her:

From across an ocean, it is hard to know what the New World is. All I knew were the stories I was told of monsters and valiant men sworn to slay them. But now that I’ve nearly traversed the ocean that separates New World from old, I fear that the stories I’ve heard may have clouded the truth more than clarified it. It would seem these monsters are men—sons, brothers, fathers. And it would seem these men fear their own monsters—an empire... a navy... a king... my father.” (XVI, 32:45-33:38)

 

 

What Abigail describes is not a change of heart but an epistemological event: the account of reality she has been taking as a natural given turns out to be a theory of the world, and direct experience has falsified it. The monsters are men. The valiant men sworn to slay them are, from where she now stands, the monsters. This is the show’s denaturalization argument in its most compressed form, and it is delivered not by a pirate making a self-interested case but by a colonial governor’s daughter who has no stake in arriving at this conclusion. Her diary entry exposes the violence of the state, implicitly rejecting notions of legitimacy and legality to instead center the pirates as agents upon whom an unjust violence is visited, rather than criminals deserving of retribution. Abigail even understands her intimate relationship to the violence of the extractive system: she names her own kin as she lists who it is that the pirates fear.

Abigail has inherited, in miniature, the pirate narrative traced in Chapter 3. The show is here obviously playing with its central source material—19th century pirate romance—but because of the genealogy of said source material it also ends up echoing Arnaudov’s argument that the pirate was already a creature of myth as the Golden Age was unfolding; what Abigail encounters is not the truth behind a later fiction, but the material reality obscured by a mythology that was there from the beginning.

The formal dimension of this process of re-humanization is as important as the thematic one. Black Sails is a show that demonstrably knows how to construct interiority: McGraw’s backstory unfolds across an entire season of flashbacks, Rackham’s father’s tragedy is rendered in biographical detail precise enough to name the street in Leeds; generally the show’s characters are given pasts and flaws and complexity. But the narrative grants this depth selectively and deliberately. When Rogers tells Rackham “all you know about me is what I want you to know” (XXVI, 30:49), the line gestures toward hidden depths that the show then declines to reveal. In a different drama, this would be an opening: we would learn who Rogers is beneath the administrator, and that knowledge would complicate our judgment of him. Black Sails withholds it. We never learn anything personal about Rogers, nothing about the prosecutors or court officials or naval officers beyond their function. The show that has spent four seasons granting interiority to pirates, that has shown us what it costs to be designated a monster, what structural forces produced each member of the motley crew, what it feels like to have civilization’s violence administered to one’s body—extends no equivalent access to the men who administer it. That is not an oversight: it is a formal redistribution of narrative attention, refusing the interiority usually granted automatically to agents of order and extending it instead to those the dominant narrative has treated as villains.

There is one thing Black Sails does that no monograph can: across four seasons, the show gives us pirates who eat and sleep and grieve and fall in love. We watch Flint sit with Miranda Hamilton in the home they have made together in Nassau. We watch Vane’s face in the moment he understands he is going to die. We watch Silver and Madi’s relationship develop with the full texture of intimacy and disagreement. We watch the crew eat together, laugh, shout, gamble. This could be seen as fluff around the historiographical argument, but I argue it is the argument, made available through a medium that written history cannot replicate in the same register.

The objection that emotional engagement is epistemologically suspect, that it manipulates rather than argues, tends to assume that written history is affectively neutral—which it is not. As Hayden White demonstrates in Metahistory (1973), no historical narrative escapes prefiguration as a recognizable kind of story: every work of history combines a mode of “emplotment” (Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire), a mode of argument (Formist, Mechanistic, Organicist, Contextualist), and a mode of ideological implication (Anarchist, Conservative, Radical, Liberal) before a single fact is marshaled in its support. The ‘neutral’ monograph is not exempt from this grid; it is simply prefigured in a mode that disguises its generic choices as the absence of choice. Rediker’s own histories are instructive here: organized as Tragedy, explained through Mechanistic (structural causation), carrying an explicitly Radical ideological charge—the same triad White locates, not incidentally, in Marx’s own historical writing. His commitment to recovering pirate voices is itself an emotional and political choice about whose humanity matters. The difference is that film and television make their affective argument visibly, which makes it easier to dismiss. But in a show whose central claim is that the people designated as monsters were human beings whose humanity was systematically denied, the emotional register is not decoration.20This is consistent with Jörn Rüsen’s account of the aesthetic dimension of historical narration: not ornament added to historical knowledge but the “pre-cognitive level on which knowledge must be anchored to be effective”, producing something close to a catharsis of memory through historiography (Della Gala, 2024: 191). Rüsen is careful to specify the limit of this claim: aesthetic engagement becomes manipulation precisely when it detaches from the research and interpretation that ground it. That is the test this thesis has applied to Black Sails throughout—its affect survives scrutiny because it remains yoked, scene by scene, to the documentary and historiographical record traced in the preceding chapters. When we have spent four seasons knowing these people—their losses, their attachments, their contradictions—the monster designation becomes not just analytically untenable but experientially so.21On a metanarrative level, noting this is exactly the purpose Abigail serves as a character. That is what historiophoty can do that the monograph cannot: it does not only argue that these people were human, it makes us feel the truth of that claim. As Rosenstone argues, the appropriate question to ask of historical film is not whether it is accurate but what historical world it constructs and how (1995: 50). The historical world Black Sails constructs is one in which the people the Atlantic order designated as its enemies had inner lives worth knowing; and the serial format, with its slow accumulation of character across years of narrative, is the condition that makes that construction possible. In Rüsen’s typology of historical sense-making, this places Black Sails predominantly in the Critical mode—denying the validity of the inherited civilization/monster narrative—compounded with the Genetic, which locates meaning in temporal change itself rather than fixed origin (Della Gala, 2024: 192). Chapter 6 returns to this as the show’s Gramscian “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. 

 

Notes
20
This is consistent with Jörn Rüsen’s account of the aesthetic dimension of historical narration: not ornament added to historical knowledge but the “pre-cognitive level on which knowledge must be anchored to be effective”, producing something close to a catharsis of memory through historiography (Della Gala, 2024: 191). Rüsen is careful to specify the limit of this claim: aesthetic engagement becomes manipulation precisely when it detaches from the research and interpretation that ground it. That is the test this thesis has applied to Black Sails throughout—its affect survives scrutiny because it remains yoked, scene by scene, to the documentary and historiographical record traced in the preceding chapters.
21
On a metanarrative level, noting this is exactly the purpose Abigail serves as a character.
Part Two  ·  Chapter V
Chapter V  ·  Part Two

Dare To Struggle

Imperialism is everywhere. Through the culture that it spreads, through its misinformation, it gets us to think like it does, it gets us to submit to it, and to go along with all its maneuvers.

— Thomas Sankara, Who are the enemies of the people? (1983)
5.1  Reform or Revolution

Chapter 4 demonstrated how Black Sails deconstructs the monster narrative and makes the violence of Empire and capitalism legible as violence. Using this deconstruction as its foundation, the show builds its own corrective narrative: the emergence of collective consciousness from material conditions and struggle, and the argument—made through character, plot, and the specific affordances of the serialized form—that the defeat of the pirates in Nassau was produced by specific political choices rather than structural inevitability.

The ideological terrain the show has to clear before that argument can be made is the question of reform. At the center of Black Sails is a sustained tension between two positions on what political change requires. The show dramatizes their consequences rather than resolving the debate by authorial fiat: the reformist position is held, at different moments in the narrative and in different registers by people of varying sociopolitical positioning and enacted through sundry tactics. 

Reform and revolution are meant here in their barest sense of social change enacted within existing structures versus social transformation through the upheaval of the current system. Historically, the question of reformism emerges from the ideological struggle within the Left about political method: early utopian socialists believed social transformation could be achieved by persuading the powerful of its necessity; the Gotha program (1875) represented a codification of the reformist tendency within the organized workers’ movement, an expression of the belief that existing state structures could be used as instruments of emancipation rather than obstacles to it—it was sharply criticized by Marx for its Lassalleanist conception of state neutrality and embrace of bourgeois democratic ideals. In the early twentieth century, Eduard Bernstein gave this tendency its most systematic theoretical expression, arguing that capitalism could be gradually humanized through parliamentary and trade union action; Rosa Luxemburg’s rebuttal outlined in her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? (1899), that reformist practice does not accumulate gradually toward transformation but instead stabilizes the system it claims to be changing, has inspired the title of this section. 

Black Sails does not engage with this debate explicitly—its characters do not speak the language of European socialist politics—but it stages the same fundamental question through the specific conditions of Nassau in 1715 (can the existing order be made humane, or must it be overthrown?), and arrives at conclusions Luxemburg would have recognized. This is a “very contemporary story”, executive producer Jonathan Steinberg explains in the supplemental material to the Season 1 DVD, referring to the socioeconomic climate of the 2010s, “a story about people who feel disenfranchised, who feel like the economic system they’re living under really is not built for them and in the worst case is actually built against them”. How each of these characters or group of characters decides to tackle the system’s injustice is thus a major driving narrative force, and conflicting opinions, political understandings and methods drive the plot. The point is not just that the show depicts political conflict but that political conflict is the engine of the narrative in the same way that, for historical materialists, class struggle is the engine of history. When Eleanor and Vane argue about whether to seek legitimacy from England, when the Maroon Queen and Julius disagree about whether to fight for security or transformation, when Billy argues for collective emancipation over personal interest—these are not dramatic devices that ‘happen’ to have political content. The plot doesn’t illustrate the argument: the plot is the argument, structurally. The show’s plot advances the way history does: through the collision of incompatible material interests and the political projects they generate, and through consequences that arrive long after their causes. Nassau ­falls because of contradictions that were there from the beginning, working themselves out across four seasons. The show’s very causal logic is materialist.

The serialized format matters here in a specific way: it gives that causal logic time to unfold the way history does, through accumulation, through the slow working-out of contradictions, through consequences that arrive episodes or seasons after their causes. A film has to compress; a monograph can narrate sequentially but its dominant mode remains argumentative rather than experiential. The serial format produces something closer to the experience of living through history: one thing leading to another, no single moment decisive, the outcome shaped by the aggregate of choices made under conditions not of anyone’s choosing. This goes back once again to what Rosenstone argues in Visions of the Past: that the appropriate question to ask of historical visual media is not whether it is accurate, but what historical world it constructs and how (1995: 50). 

The viewers’ first contact with the reformist position comes from interspersed flashbacks in Season 2, when we are introduced to Thomas Hamilton, the eldest son of the former Lord Proprietor of the Bahamas. Tasked by his father to formulate a plan to restore commerce to a Bahamas archipelago by then riddled with piracy, Thomas is provided with the assistance of the Royal Navy, and meets Flint (then Lieutenant McGraw) who is assigned as his liaison to the Admiralty. Thomas’ plan is a blanket amnesty for the pirates, pushed through parliament using his father’s money and political connections, in order to make Nassau a hospitable place where these men can live and work without being hunted. The proposal is radical in its implications (treating pirates as potential citizens who deserve rehabilitation and reinsertion) but the method is entirely institutional: Thomas is working within the system he hopes to change.

Thomas gets the support of Lord Peter Ashe, whom we meet again in the present timeline as the Governor of Carolina, but he cannot actually secure political change that goes against the logics of the system through its own channels. The pardons are conceptually unbearable to the Crown, because the status of criminal the pirates are branded with is, as we have demonstrated in Chapter 2, essential to the superstructural worldview that supports the material reality of commercial and geopolitical interests in the Atlantic. Thomas’ affair with Flint is eventually instrumentalized to socially eliminate him and bury his project with him:  he is committed to an asylum, his possessions seized, the official record rewritten into a domestic scandal clean enough that a decade later it is relayed as gossip stripped of both its political background and even of the stain of homosexuality, as the version of the narrative that survived in whispers is that Flint was sleeping with Thomas’ wife and that Thomas went insane and eventually committed suicide. 

When Woodes Rogers arrives in Nassau in Season 3 to offer the pirates a royal pardon, he is effectively implementing Thomas’ plan. The show makes this explicit: “all I have done here is finish what you began. I am now what you were then,” Rogers tells Flint (XXV, 49:16). On the level of narrative structure Thomas and Rogers are foils, characters whose surface similarity throws into relief a deeper opposition; but the show is doing more than literary craft here. The foil relationship is the formal vehicle through which it makes a political argument about the mechanics of co-optation: the same proposal, in the hands of different actors at a different historical moment, produces opposite political effects. Political projects that aim to ease rather than to transform can be used to subjugate and quell more radical movements: this is a Luxemburgist argument. 

Thomas’ project belongs to a world that is still, in the terms this thesis established in Chapter 2, in formation: imperial control over the waters not yet fully consolidated, the outcome of the struggle between states and pirates not yet determined, and most importantly, in the midst of the extremely unstable international situation caused by the War of the Spanish Succession. Rogers, on the other hand, arrives in Nassau in a changed world: post-Utrecht, with a Europe “shaped” in the “interests” of Great Britain (Simms, 2016: 51), which ushered in a period of British “maritime, commercial and financial supremacy” (Trevelyan, 2011: 363). A pardon offered in the first context is an intervention in a system still being built, at a time where the ruling class is significantly weaker, with the risk of destabilizing that system; a pardon offered in the second is the absorption of radical elements into the social order with the aim to erase that radicality from the public consciousness. Black Sails makes an argument about the relationship between political tactics and historical conjuncture: the same act means something different depending on which side of a historical turning point it falls on. The show translates into visual and narrative form the political dialectics of the reformist process; here we can see fiction specifically in the service of conveying analytical meaning. The flashback structure is also doing specific work: we watch reformism fail in retrospect, from the vantage point of a present-tense narrative in which Flint has already drawn the lesson. What the Thomas/Rogers parallel demonstrates is that the system does not simply reject progressive reformist projects: it preserves them, empties them of their potential transformative content and radical elements, and redeploys them in the service of consolidation. Thomas’ amnesty, stripped of his humanist vision, becomes a pacification strategy. What survives of it is the form, not the substance. It is important to remember here that the script for the series was being written at the height of debates about co-optation of radicalism during movements such as Occupy or BLM, and that Steinberg and Levine have repeatedly stated their intent in telling a “contemporary” story. 

The Charles Town arc is where the reformist logic Flint has been operating under since we met him finally runs out of road. It spans across episodes XVI-XVIII and is structured around a single political gambit that collapses. When he arrives in Carolina with Abigail Ashe as a bargaining chip, Flint is still thinking institutionally—viewing Ashe as a sympathetic insider, a man who was there when Thomas’ project was alive and who might be persuaded to revive it, and who has the political capital to enact change. The plan is for Flint to confess his crimes before parliament, demonstrate he is a flawed man but not a monster, and use Ashe’s position to broker reconciliation between England and the Nassau pirates. These are still McGraw’s politics, not Flint’s. Ashe initially seems to engage with this plan; during the dinner in episode XVII, they even reach tentative agreement. Then the illusion collapses when it is revealed that Ashe sold Thomas out for his own careerist interest—this is how his position in Carolina was secured. His willingness to negotiate now is not a trace of the idealism of his youth but cold political calculation at a crucial point in the stabilization of British influence in the region, and when Miranda confronts him directly, one of Ashe’s men shoots her through the head. 

Miranda’s death is the pivot. She was the last connection to the reformist project, the person who kept Thomas’ letters, who maintained the hope that England could be appealed to despite the harm it has dealt her personally. Her murder closes the possibility that the system can be reasoned with at all. Ashe did not pull the trigger but he is effectively her executioner, not in a rogue act of personal violence, but silencing a politically dangerous individual. It happens mid-sentence, shockingly and suddenly, at the exact moment when Miranda has named the truth out loud. 

Flint is arrested and tried in Charles Town. The trial makes explicit what was latent in the Kensington prosecution speech that was analyzed in Chapter 4: the legal machinery exists to confirm the verdict, not to discover it. When Vane shows up with Abigail’s diary to be Flint’s character witness, Ashe’s prosecutor reassures the Governor in a closed session by telling him they might as well throw the diary in the fire: the jury has already made up their minds anyway. Flint’s public statement that “everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it” (XVIII, 23:57) kills the reformist illusion for good. Flint actively taking on the monster moniker echoes strikingly the formulation Rediker employs in the conclusion of the last chapter of Villains of All Nations: 

Before, during, and after they died, these pirates said to their respectable contemporaries: whatever you fear—violence, destruction, the devil, death—we are that. We embrace it. We are the other. We are your nightmare. You have made us ugly, and we throw that ugliness in your face (2004: 168).

It is a political decision: Flint will now embody the figure of the pirate as colonial authorities imagine and depict it, on purpose, in the struggle against them. When he orders his crew to fire indiscriminately on Charles Town it is not grief-driven revenge in the same register as his earlier acts—although of course he is grief-stricken. Earlier in the series Flint’s violence is personal, reactive, driven by the specific injury done to him and Thomas and Miranda. This is different. He is not attacking Ashe or the man who shot Miranda; he is attacking the city, the symbol of the colonial order that has just demonstrated its nature to him completely. The show dramatizes here in real time the transformation the Thomas/Rogers parallel argued in retrospect: we watch Flint close the door on reformist politics and walk through a different one.

Kathrin Friedrich’s study of Black Sails demonstrates that the serialized format allows character complexity and nonverbal cues to invite a ‘liking’ for morally complex characters such as Flint—a positive response operating beneath the level of moral approval, built through accumulated contradictory signals: confidence and uncertainty, ruthlessness and weariness (Friedrich, 2021). Friedrich is interested in viewer engagement for its own sake, but I argue that the mechanism does more than produce sympathy: sustained identification with Flint across four seasons positions the viewer to adopt his interpretation of events as correct. By the time Flint outlines his reasoning for the necessity of revolutionary violence in the final arcs of the show, the viewer has spent dozens of hours inside his perspective. This discursive mode allows the creators of Black Sails to recruit the viewer to their reading of history. His development even follows most people’s political radicalization/development of class consciousness (deeply personal identity/positionality based grievance that allows one to widen their understanding of the world and social conflict and develop solidarity with people socially positioned differently) which allows for further identification with the character if one is so disposed.

5.2  Too many goddamn men: gender, race, false consciousness

The argument made through Flint becomes sharper when read against what Black Sails does with Eleanor Guthrie. Her arc across the series acts as a structural counterpoint: where Flint moves toward a position of total opposition to the colonial order, Eleanor moves toward accommodation. What makes the counterpoint historiographically significant rather than merely dramatic is what Eleanor’s arc demonstrates about how the colonial order sustains itself, not only through the violence and legal machinery Chapter 4 established, but through the extension of partial recognition to some of the people it exploits and oppresses through a hierarchy of marginalization, which binds them to the system more effectively than outright coercion ever could.

Before she makes her choice, Eleanor is told exactly what it will cost. In Episode XIV, Vane lays out the structural logic with a precision the narrative will spend three seasons confirming:

Beg them to let you keep what is already yours, show them that weakness, and you’ll invite the very outcome you wish to avoid. Side with me and we will show England that this place has never been stronger, and we’ll keep our freedom for another day, another month, another year, a lifetime. (XIV, 36:53-39:08)

 

 

The scene cuts without Eleanor’s counter-argument because there is none she could make that holds. Vane’s power is military and self-contained; it doesn’t depend on recognition from anyone to function. If anything, because pirates deal in fear, it might even be fueled by the ‘civilized’ world’s rejection. But Eleanor’s always has: her leverage runs through commercial networks, through being legible to people on multiple sides; she is Nassau’s fence (as in a receiver of stolen goods), but in truth her role is more that of a bridge between the world of commerce and the world of theft. That kind of power requires someone to grant it, which means refusing England entirely is not an option actually available to her in the way Vane presents it. Eleanor is smart; she can see the trap. She simply cannot find a way out of it, because fundamentally, her worldview operates on an analytical plane that does not account for the position people like her occupy: simultaneously agents of Empire, and under its boot.  

What Eleanor wants from England is not protection but admission. This is visible in her pitch to Vane:

We control something so valuable, the whole of England wants it. We control Nassau, and the ransom we are going to demand for her is going to be fucking enormous. More than money. More than land. Legitimacy. [...] the moment they ratify our control over this place, no more fighting, no more leads, no more chasing our fucking meals. I’m talking about making money the way London makes money: collecting it, not hunting it, and in amounts that mean something. (XIV, 36:53-39:08)

The distinction between collecting and hunting is the distinction between exploiting and being exploited, between the class that extracts and the class that produces. Eleanor does not want to dismantle the system; she wants to be on the right side of it. Piracy, as Chapter 2 established, functioned outside the extractive logic of capital accumulation: the motley crew rejected wage labor in favor of collective ownership, explicitly removing the parasitic figures of state or employer from the equation. Eleanor’s vision for the island is a restoration of imperial order: a taxing authority, Nassau as a rent-collecting operation legitimized by England rather than an autonomous community threatening it.

That she believes this is an avenue available to her is not only naivety. It is what whiteness and economic privilege afford ideologically: the conviction that the system rewards those who play by its rules, that her race and class position should entitle her to a better deal than the one she is currently getting. Vane, who grew up indentured and in captivity, does not hold an equivalent belief, because he was taught a much rawer and honest version of the world’s rules early, in hunger and under the whip. Eleanor’s illusion that she can negotiate her way back into the extracting class is the ideological expression of a position she does partly occupy, which is precisely what makes it so difficult for her to see. 

To be recognized by the colonial order she aims to join, Eleanor must speak in its terms. In Episode XVII, when the rich plantation owner Underhill tells her: 

For so many years I have watched you and your kind thieve and whore and kill like a plague upon this island, doing whatever you please because you can. I’ve heard your appeal.  How could I be expected to trust one of you? (28:58)

She replies:

How could you trust a pirate?  I am no pirate, sir.  I’m an Englishwoman.  I’m my father’s daughter.  And I will be the end of piracy in this place. (29:21)

 

What is striking here is how Eleanor performs respectability for Underhill by adopting the colonial gaze on piracy itself: she internalizes the othering language of monstrosity to distance herself from it. By claiming “I am an Englishwoman” she asserts membership in the imperial order through national identity rather than structural power, and “I’m my father’s daughter” invokes patrilineal legitimacy and her connection to the commercial order. The characterization she is agreeing with, of people who used to be her ‘own’ as degenerates who “thieve and whore and kill like a plague” is in the same register, almost the same vocabulary, as the court official’s speech at Vane’s execution (“Men who are not men at all, but beasts governed by the base instinct, incapable of anything but the most primal behaviors”). The price of admission in the spheres of power is adoption and reproduction of the dominant ideology. 

By Season 3, the credential Eleanor staked in XVII has acquired a shape. “Englishwoman” is no longer a claim she makes in a single confrontation but a role she embodies, daily, inside Fort Nassau: reinvented as Woodes’ docile wife, we see her sitting silently with her needlepoint—although she is not used to these womanly, domestic pursuits, and clumsily pricks her finger. Adherence to the system’s hierarchy has a body language: silence, disciplined posture, an object in the hands. Eleanor narrates this conversion herself:

If the street understands us better when I sit among your men’s wives rather than your men, if the world makes more sense to them that way and your authority grows because of it, as uncomfortable as it may be, then that is a compromise I am willing to make. (XXIX, 19:30-19:41)

 

But “compromise” implies two parties with comparable leverage, each giving something up. What Eleanor describes is not a compromise but a transfer: her authority moves to Rogers, and what she receives in exchange is the very role she thinks she is simply performing: safety, offered by a man and just as easily retractable. The production’s own account of this moment confirms the asymmetry; Levine frames Rogers’ initial interest in Eleanor in instrumental terms: “his best asset is to bring along [Eleanor], someone who understands [the island] better than anyone” (Bonus Features, S3). Steinberg describes her inclusion in Rogers’ confidence as “another moment of her being led into his trust” (Bonus Features, S3). Eleanor experiences her collaboration with Rogers as being trusted; the show, and its own writers, frame it as being managed.

Max, in the same fort, refuses the needlepoint. The contrast is the same foil device the show used with Thomas and Rogers—same room, opposite choices—but the difference here is not simply tactical. Max has no equivalent claim to ‘Englishwomanhood’ available to her: she is the illegitimate child of a plantation owner and a slave; the credential Eleanor is cashing in was never on offer to Max in the first place. 

Legal scholar Tamsin Phillipa Paige, reading the show as a social discourse text in her article “The Whore That Lost Everything: The Tyranny of Law and the Queer Feminisation of Soft Power as Explored in Black Sails” (2023), analyzes Eleanor’s arc versus Max’s as two women with complicated relationships to power and the law. She offers a rich feminist reading of Eleanor’s failure as stemming from treating soft power as inherently subordinate to hard power, while Max succeeds by rejecting that hierarchy entirely. Her framework is valuable for understanding the inherent misogyny in Eleanor’s self-perception, a perception fed by the fact she is “regularly punished for the moment she steps out of feminine modes of power and attempts to exert masculine power modes” (Paige, 2023: 426). This analysis however operates entirely on the gender and sexuality axis without accounting for race. Her breakdown of Eleanor’s choice to accept the needlepoint (a metaphor for soft power) captures why it feels like a real loss of leverage to Eleanor and the viewer, yet that framework  does not account for what it means that Eleanor even has the option to negotiate in the first place.

The colonial order subordinates Eleanor as a woman and elevates her as white through the same apparatus, although she is blind to it. In Episode XXXIII, Eleanor narrates the whole of her life along the one axis she can see, while the other sits, unexamined and almost obscene, in the flattening of her relationships with all the men in her orbit as unilaterally oppressive and controlling. 

For so long, I thought I knew what I was. A daughter who usurped her father.  A woman who had taken control of a wild place. Scott was proof of that.  The one who saw me that way too, who substantiated it. […] I know I did [do all these things]. But always with a man behind me doing his damnedest to bend it all to his benefit. My father, Scott, Charles, you. So many goddamn men here. Too many goddamn men here. (20:21-21:36)

 

Every man on this list did use Eleanor (albeit in different circumstances and to different lengths), and the show does not ask the viewer to doubt that. But the list sorts four relationships into one category—men who held power over her—and that category erases the power Eleanor holds over some men too. One of the men she cites as proof of her gendered helplessness is someone she owns. Mr. Scott is legally her property. The show is never timid about this abject asymmetry: in Season 1, when Eleanor asks him if he might leave her, he answers “Where else would I go? I belong to you. Chattel property of the Guthrie estate” (VII, 14:57). Without the inclusion of Mr. Scott, Eleanor’s diatribe resembles the run-of-the-mill dialogue one would expect from a specific type of female empowerment narrative that became a recurring feature of television and popular media in the early 2000s (Bae, 2011). But when she mentions her slave as a man who “bent it all to his own benefit”, the line produces a shock of recontextualization.

Despite the very real nature of Eleanor’s struggles, the fact that she even exists as someone who can be wronged is noteworthy: that is what whiteness gives her. Eleanor’s entire framework, including how she experiences herself as oppressed, operates within a grammar that does not exist for enslaved people. Eleanor’s consciousness is structured so that the only axis of oppression she perceives is gender, because the racial axis is where she is privileged, not disadvantaged. And as grievance seems to be the only thing that registers as politically real to her, she literally cannot see the framework that benefits her.

Gender and racial ideology do not operate separately on Eleanor, but rather work in an inextricable fashion. The very vulnerability and defenselessness that define her gendered subordination also obscure her racial position, because white femininity’s construction as fragile and deserving of protection was historically built on the exclusion of Black women from the category of womanhood, and on the ‘brutification’ of Black men22The relationship between the construction of white womanhood and the racial order of Atlantic capitalism has been extensively documented. On white women as active economic participants in rather than passive bystanders to the slave economy, see Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property, (2019). On the figure of the Black “beast-rapist” as a symbol of terror in the service of white patriarchy, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 1993, particularly pages 151-157.. Eleanor’s experience of compromise and dependency feels total to her precisely because it is calibrated to white womanhood, which means the racial dimensions of her power remain invisible within her own understanding of power. In other words, she processes her own power over Mr. Scott as naturalized fact. This is made explicit when Mr. Scott refers to himself as “chattel property” and she replies to him “you know I’ve never seen you that way” (VII, 15:10). Mr. Scott’s position not only within her household but within society at large is only digestible to her in personal, emotional, but most importantly individual terms.

Eleanor’s oppression and her subsequent elevation are thus the result of the same mechanism operating on the same axis. The ‘vulnerability’ and ‘fragility’ she both performs and feels restricted by is itself a racial privilege, something that Mr. Scott, Max, or Madi could never wield. The key insight is that Eleanor’s ability to negotiate her oppression (to move between positions while remaining a person) is itself a racial privilege that Mr. Scott simply doesn’t have access to. There’s no scale for him to climb or renegotiate; he exists in a single, fixed position as property23Blackness in this sense is a negation of the Enlightenment definition of humanness as the capacity for progress, the differential allocation of fixity to a racialized subgroup (Wolfe, 2016: 9). On slavery as a condition of “social death” that transcends the direct material reality of unfreedom and total exploitation and extends into the psychological and social dimensions of existence, see Orlando Patterson’s seminal Slavery and Social Death, 1982. On race as a technology of social management see Alana Lentin, The New Racial Regimes 2025. On whiteness as characterized primarily as the guarantee of personhood and freedom see Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1993).. It is not that Eleanor suffers one type of oppression while benefiting from another, but that the very dimension along which she can experience oppression and recovery is only available to white people. 

Eleanor’s blindness to Mr. Scott’s condition reflects her inability to recognize that her own subordination, real as it is, belongs to a fundamentally different order than his. The period’s racial logic did not simply rank oppressions on a scale: it created categorically incommensurable forms of subjection. This is made even more explicit when we are introduced to the Maroon community: in order to allow his wife and child to access personhood, Mr. Scott must fake their deaths (so that they cease to exist as nonpeople), and they must escape to what essentially constitutes another world, parallel to but never intersecting with ‘civilization’. For people like Mr. Scott, freedom can only come from escaping, breaking the law, existing outside the system entirely—or upending it, which  is what his daughter Madi intends to do. This point is highlighted visually for the viewer in the introduction of the Maroon Island in Episode XXII (13:38): for a moment it feels like the genre has shifted; shots like the one below borrow the aesthetics of uncharted territories, uncontacted tribes, a self-contained enclave outside mundane colonial reality24This impression is confirmed by Steinberg explaining “I think we wanted the maroon camp to feel like it was in the middle of this very dense wilderness, so that it would seem deadly to try to get out of there” in the production featurette of the Season 3 DVD.. The majority of Black Sails is set in the Caribbean, already a tropical location, and yet something about the Maroon Island feels fundamentally out of place: it is that all evident signs of the periodization such as European eighteenth century clothing, buildings, and artefacts have disappeared. The ‘civilized’ world has no dominion here. 

Village

Mr. Scott was never confused about what he and Eleanor were to each other. On his deathbed, when Madi tells him he has “daughters on both sides” of the coming war (Eleanor with Rogers, Madi with the pirates), he corrects her, insisting “only you” (XXVII, 26:17). Madi tells Eleanor something similar not long after: that her father mistrusted all white people, including Eleanor (XXXIV, 07:31). Her tone is not particularly accusatory; this is a description of what their respective positioning produces, a fact of life.

Eleanor dies in Episode XXXIV, in the Spanish assault on Nassau that Rogers’ bargain with Havana precipitated. She is killed fighting to save Madi in the burning house of Miranda Barlow, the reformist who didn’t survive trusting England either. This last act is the one moment in her entire arc where she acts across the line instead of along it. Her last words are a question—if Rogers is responsible for the apocalypse raining down on her island—and Flint does her the kindness of lying to her. She dies without an accurate account of what she has done, which feels appropriate for a character arc marked by false consciousness. 

The vocabulary used in this section, as well as the recognition of the pattern of a real, sincerely-felt grievance that nonetheless obscures the speaker’s own position in a different hierarchy, was of course not available to anyone living through the events Black Sails dramatizes. It was available however to the show’s own audience as it was airing, increasingly so as the series went on. Mikki Kendall’s #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen entered circulation the year before the show premiered (Kendall: 2013); the debates that would settle ‘white feminism’ into popular critical shorthand ran through the show’s broadcast years and peaked around its finale. A viewer watching Eleanor’s “too many goddamn men” speech in 2016 would have had recent, specific practice recognizing this pattern as a live argument about the present.

Notes
22
The relationship between the construction of white womanhood and the racial order of Atlantic capitalism has been extensively documented. On white women as active economic participants in rather than passive bystanders to the slave economy, see Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property, (2019). On the figure of the Black “beast-rapist” as a symbol of terror in the service of white patriarchy, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 1993, particularly pages 151-157.
23
Blackness in this sense is a negation of the Enlightenment definition of humanness as the capacity for progress, the differential allocation of fixity to a racialized subgroup (Wolfe, 2016: 9). On slavery as a condition of “social death” that transcends the direct material reality of unfreedom and total exploitation and extends into the psychological and social dimensions of existence, see Orlando Patterson’s seminal Slavery and Social Death, 1982. On race as a technology of social management see Alana Lentin, The New Racial Regimes 2025. On whiteness as characterized primarily as the guarantee of personhood and freedom see Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1993).
24
This impression is confirmed by Steinberg explaining “I think we wanted the maroon camp to feel like it was in the middle of this very dense wilderness, so that it would seem deadly to try to get out of there” in the production featurette of the Season 3 DVD.
5.3  We are many, they are few: collective consciousness

The section above traced an understanding of one’s social positioning that never makes a particular transition. Eleanor’s grievances are real, but they stay organized around herself and the interpersonal: things done to her, by individuals. She never arrives at fully recognizing her position as one instance of a shared structure (not even when it comes to gender, as she does not extend solidarity to other women), something that can be acted on collectively. In Marx’s terms, she never moves from being part of a class “in itself”—a group defined by a shared relation to power, whether or not its members recognize this—to a class for itself: a group conscious of that shared position and organized around it (Marx & Engels, 1976: 187). What follows tracks the paths of characters who do make this transition. They begin reacting to their own exploitation in personal registers—revenge, cruelty redirected downward, sometimes the same logic of accommodation Eleanor never escapes—and arrive, through specific experience and accumulated struggle, at recognizing themselves as members of a collective force with shared interests, and then acting on it. This is Thompson and Rediker’s ‘history from below’ as something the show can dramatize rather than apply: not the recovery of consciousness from the record after the fact, but its formation exemplified and illustrated. 

Season 3 opens on multiple masked figures clad in all black attacking a town in the dead of night, cutting down the few soldiers keeping guard, setting houses on fire, and conducting executions on the spot. Flint, who is revealed to be one of those figures, breaks the door down of the local magistrate’s house, and addresses himself to the man and his sobbing wife:

You are the magistrate here.  Hazzard.  Bridgetown, St. Kitts, Martinique, Nevis... their magistrates hanged men for piracy. They all receive visits from me. The word went forth... any capital sentence served against a pirate would hear my answer. You must have known. You must have heard. And yet you chose to hang those three men in your square. Why? The magistrate: If I didn’t... if I let my fear of you prevent me from enforcing the law, then civilization in this place is dead. I also know that most of those other magistrates you visited, they were corrupt men, dishonest men. I wagered that despite all I’d heard about you, your mercilessness, your cruelty, that you could tell the difference. That you could see I was an honest man. (XIX, 10:20-11:40)

 

The moment the words “honest man” leave the magistrate’s mouth, Flint shoots him in the head, then immediately shoots his wife. We see here the burgeoning consciousness that Flint already possessed in Season 1 now matured: he no longer conceptualizes of individuals in the magistrate’s position as individuals, but rather as the function they perform within the wider imperial system, and so it is irrelevant whether this specific magistrate was corrupt like his counterparts—he ultimately bolsters a ‘corrupt’ system. Crucially, Flint does not only understand his own class as both a class “in itself” and a class for itself, but also that of his oppressors; this is why he also executes the magistrate’s wife. Taken within the context of what the show has been politically building towards, the subtext of this scene is not that Flint has grown merciless and cruel, but rather that the events at Charlestown helped him understand the process we named in 4.2: even the ‘honest’ magistrate engages in abject violence that the show has been repeatedly making legible for its viewers—against wage laborers, against women, against the enslaved, against anyone marginalized by it. 

Beyond the show’s protagonist, the characters of Vane, Billy, and the crew as a collective conceptual entity illustrate the transition to class for itself along three different routes. Vane’s structural position is the clearest the show offers: born enslaved, he has never not been part of the exploited class “in itself”. His arc tracks something more specific: when the vocabulary that names this position stops being something he reaches for to justify actions primarily powered by anger and resentment and becomes an ideology he organizes around and addresses to people he will never meet. Billy’s relationship to that vocabulary runs the other direction: it arrives first, as inheritance and instruction from his parents, before he has any lived position of his own to ground it in; his own experience of impressment and torture then tests that inheritance and rebuilds it from the inside, and he becomes, in turn, the one transmitting it onward—to his own crew, and across factional lines. The crew tests the question at the level of the group itself: a body of people who objectively share Vane’s and Billy’s relation to power, whose collective decisions can reproduce the very logic of bondage that produced that position just as easily as they can refuse it.

By Season 2, Vane has taken the island’s fort and effectively become Nassau’s ruler. Richard Guthrie, Eleanor’s father, who has been working to bring the island back under English rule, is captured and crucified on Vane’s order: a public execution for treason against Nassau’s independence. When Eleanor finds the body, there is a note pinned to it, addressed to her. The note gives a political-personal justification for the killing, in Vane’s own terms: 

I was once a slave. I know too well the pain of the yoke on my shoulders and of the freedom of having cast it off. So I’m resolved; I will be no slave again.  And as I am free, I hereby claim the same for Nassau. She is free today, and so long as I draw breath, she shall remain free. Richard Guthrie was engaged in an effort to see her return to the rule of a king, to see the yoke returned. He betrayed Nassau. (XVI, 45:55-46:25). 

 

 

The note also settles a debt. Vane had earlier agreed to hand over the hostage Abigail Ashe in exchange for a captured Spanish warship; Eleanor took Abigail without honoring that exchange, and the note informs her that Vane intends to take the ship from Flint by force instead. There is in Vane at that stage a reflexive quality to the articulation of his positioning in relation to wider structural forces: even as he works for personal gain against his fellow pirates, the language he reaches for is one of collective liberation. He understands something fundamental about the dialectical relationship between his own individual freedom and what piracy allows for others of his class, and what the suppression of piracy would mean for them not just because of the loss of livelihood, but because of what the Republic of Pirates allows them to be: men outside the system. 

The show refuses the trap of arguing for the simplistic and erroneous notion that class consciousness emerges from suffering and exploitation alone. Vane has firsthand experience that eases the way to political self-understanding for him, but he is for a long time blinded, understandably, by his thirst for the kind of wealth that would ensure he is never hungry and afraid again. He is impressively astute and advanced in some ways, and ‘primitive’ specifically in his strategizing, in the application of his correct instincts. In surprisingly Leninist fashion, it quickly becomes evident that what Vane lacks is political education. 

Billy Bones is the counterpoint. His radicalism is an inheritance, progressive politics taught to him as ideology before life reinforced the lesson in his body. He was born in London to parents who were ‘Levellers’, anti-impressment activists who printed pamphlets decrying conscription; they made sure Billy was lettered specifically so he could carry the protest forward. While out distributing his parents’ agitation material, Billy is taken by a press gang in a deliberate act of ironic cruelty. He spends three years in the Navy’s bonded labor until his ship is taken by Flint’s crew. Billy kills his superior officer and chooses piracy over returning home—not from conviction, but because he cannot face his family as a murderer. This is where the inheritance runs out: his parents’ worldview was built for protest at the edges of legality: pamphlets, petitions, abuses to be exposed. It has no place in it for what Billy has been made into by the very state violence it denounces. 

On the ashes of his parents’ politics, Billy builds a belief system updated by his new circumstances, crystalized eventually in his experience as a pirate captured by the English. Returning from that captivity, he reports what he has seen of how England regards them: not as criminals but as animals (XIV, 45:55-46:10). Billy describes the torture he experienced as transformational (XV, 30:35-32:55), and from this he states a rule: “we are none of us safe until we are all safe”. He does not mean this as simple sentiment; this is a political commitment he makes and intends to follow like a doctrine: he informs the crew that anyone who would let a brother face what he faced, to spare himself, is someone he will remove. His inherited radicalism is visible here, in an enunciation of collective interest superseding individual need, including individual survival. Billy, if anything, extends his parents’ political methodology, which is a critique of one mechanism of oppression: he is articulating a principle that does not name a specific abuse so much as state the condition all of them are already in. 

In placing Billy inside this specific lineage, the show makes a historiographical argument on screen. Linebaugh and Rediker document that eighteenth-century Atlantic struggles against impressment “drew on ideas dating from the English Revolution”, specifically the Levellers’ opposition to conscription as a violation of conscience (2000: 235); Christopher Hill, cited in Many-Headed Hydra, notes that “a surprising number of English radicals emigrated to the West Indies either just before or just after [1660]”, carrying “the ideas which had originated in revolutionary England” (2000: 158-159). Billy becomes the dramatic condensation of the historical subjects Hill describes: carriers of a defeated radical tradition whose destination is the Atlantic world. The show goes beyond depicting the motley crew’s radicalism as a product of shared misery; it gives it an intellectual genealogy, roots it in an articulated political tradition that preceded the ships.

Billy brings his advanced class consciousness to his fellow pirates. On the deck of the Walrus in Episode XVII, he plays a fundamental role in moving Vane towards actively thinking of himself as a member of the ‘pirate class’. Vane followed Flint to Carolina for the ship he was promised. His men board Flint’s vessel in the harbor, and in the middle of the attack, Billy stops him, telling Vane he has “no fucking idea what is going on here”, referring to the fact Flint is in Charles Town for the collective benefit of pirates. “Flint stole from me and I’m making it right,” Vane argues, to which Billy answers: 

You hate Flint. I hate Flint. But right now he’s talking about how we survive what comes next. And you’re talking about what you think is yours. When the Navy arrives, they aren’t gonna give a fuck what belongs to you or what belongs to me. Because to them, there is no difference between you and me. (XVII, 36:57-38:11)

 

Both Flint and Vane are captured in Charles Town, and Flint is put on trial for piracy. Shackled, facing execution, Vane turns to the watching crowd: 

These men convinced you that they speak for you. That the power you’ve given them is used in your interests. That the prisoner before you is your enemy and they your friends. For those of you who live to see tomorrow... know that you had a choice to see the truth and you let yourselves be convinced otherwise. (XVIII, 33:28-33:57) 

 

Here again we see the political astuteness Vane is capable of displaying: he understands and articulates ruling class power as dependent on the passivity of the masses, on the tacit acceptance of the system and its laws. He implicitly names, as well, the purpose of the othering of criminals this thesis explored in Chapter 4, when he points out that he and the crowd are on the same side, that they share material interests, and not just that the crowd is blind to this fact, but precisely that it has been propagandized to think this way. 

Vane is eventually recaptured and hanged publicly in Nassau, after Rogers has retaken the island. By the time of his capture, per Steinberg, he has come to see religion, wage labor, and state authority as “different manifestations of the same thing” (Bonus Features, S3): Vane has extended his understanding of his specific past condition of unfreedom to a wider structural domain that encompasses all the ways in which the system subjugates people. In his cell awaiting execution, a priest comes to hear his confession. The priest lists what Vane’s violence has cost: “mothers who buried their sons because of you... what kind of a man can experience no remorse from this?”, and offers an exit: “I am a shepherd sent to help you find a path to God’s forgiveness”. Vane’s reply does not defend his violence; it reclassifies the offer: “A shepherd? You are the sheep” (XXVII, , 42:02-44:32). What the priest presents as a path to something better, available if Vane will just submit to its terms, Vane recognizes as the same shape as every other offer he has spent his life refusing: comply with this framework, and your account will be settled. Forgiveness, like wages, like the law, is something you are offered in exchange for accepting the framework that produced your need for it. 

 

Asked for his last words before being publicly hanged, he addresses the crowd:

These men who brought me here today do not fear me. They brought me here today because they fear you. Because they know that my voice, a voice that refuses to be enslaved, once lived in you.  And may yet still! They brought me here today to show you death, and use it to frighten you into ignoring that voice. But know this: we are many, they are few. To fear death is a choice. And they can’t hang us all. (XXVII, 45:00-46:01)

 

This echoes his speech in Charles Town, although this crowd is different: pirates, and people who live among pirates, certainly more receptive to his words. Beyond this difference in circumstance, the political content of the speech has also been elevated. The pattern Vane names is execution as deterrence: a spectacle staged not for the man dying but for everyone watching, meant to produce fear that outlives the spectacle and governs behavior afterward. This naming alone, of course, is insufficient. But “to fear death is a choice” identifies the one thing standing between the crowd and “they can’t hang us all”; the claim about the state’s capacity is secondary to the one about the deterrent’s function. Fear is the one part of this mechanism that belongs to the crowd, not to the men running the gallows. The moment enough of them stop supplying it, the spectacle keeps its body count and loses its purpose.

This is one of the show’s most striking historiophotic moves. As we saw in Chapter 2, the historical Rogers staged exactly this type of executions in Nassau in December 1718, deploying a hundred soldiers fearful of the assembled crowd, many members of which had been pirates themselves (Rediker, 2004: 11). The condemned pirates refused to repent; Daniel Macarty notably told the crowd not to attempt to rescue him because they did not hold that day the power to do so (Rediker, 2004: 11), with the implication that this was not a natural given. The revolutionary potential Macarty sees in the crowd is echoed in Vane’s “and may yet still.” Rediker devotes an entire chapter (“Defiance of Death Itself”, pages 148 to 170 of Villains of all Nations) to this pattern: pirates who refused the priest, cursed the court, used their one public moment for something other than what the gallows were built to extract from them. Vane’s line “they brought me here today to frighten you into ignoring that voice” is a vivid filmic illustration of what Policante describes as the purpose of these theatrical pirate executions: not retribution, but demonstrating to everyone watching “the hopelessness of revolt” (2015: 106). Steinberg confirms in the production featurette for Season 3 that the historical echo of the political content of the moment was purposeful: “[…] it felt like a moment of defiance; it was a way of showing that there were people who would step out of the crowd and align with him in full view of soldiers, and the Governor and Eleanor”. 

The figure of the pirate crew as a body tests at a different scale: not whether a person can arrive at class consciousness, but the dialectics of class struggle, the contradictions inherent to collective self-organization under conditions of ongoing oppression. What the collective requires to function as an alternative social force is named explicitly in Episode XV. Billy’s “we are none of us safe until we are all safe” stated as a binding principle with consequences, enforced by the threat of removal, is the show staging what Rediker identifies as the core of the distinctive culture of the maritime working class: a sense of brotherhood “summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: ‘they were one & all resolved to stand by one another’” (Rediker, 2004: 26).

From the show’s first ten minutes, what is being staged is pirate democracy in all its glory and difficulty: Singleton’s address to the captured merchant sailors, “we don’t rely on wages, we own a stake” (I, 9:26-10:00) states the alternative social form in the same terms Rediker uses to describe it: the abolition of the wage relation, collective ownership of the means of maritime production, egalitarian distribution of risk and reward (Rediker, 2004: 71). But the same episode immediately stages what that form runs on in practice: when Flint risks being unseated by Singleton as captain, his quartermaster Gates borrows money from Eleanor to buy votes. He visits faction leaders, negotiates with Mosiah’s African bloc, and secures the shares that will swing the election. The crew that has replaced hierarchy with democracy has not thereby replaced the personal, transactional, and factional dynamics that operate inside any political system.

The pirate commitment to “collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism” (Rediker, 2004: 26) is repeatedly tested internally: Flint’s plan to sequester the Urca gold without crew consent, justified on the grounds that the men would just squander the prize and that he is delivering them “into something better” (VII) is the captain’s authority reasserting itself against crew sovereignty in exactly the way the articles were designed to prevent. The show does not present this as pure villainy, which is the point: Flint’s calculation is rational within his own framework, and the series long dramatizes the genuine tension between collective self-governance and the kind of leadership that ‘gets things done’. This as well as Singleton’s campaign for captaincy stage Rediker’s observation that pirate democracy was contested and precarious (2004: 69-70) as a live conflict. “Several of Flint’s relationships”, Clint Jones argues in “Black Sails as Philosophy,” “bear the strain of questions of justice, right, what is good, and who should decide these things” (2020: 20).

Another pointed demonstration of the collective’s internal dialectic comes in Episode III: Vane’s crew, a collective that operates by radical democratic consensus, sentences Max to settle a debt with her body. The same structure that refuses hierarchy in the distribution of plunder reproduces the logic of slavery in the distribution of punishment. As Jones observes, “in a culture of radical democracy, if the majority of the crew believe the punishment is just, what recourse can there be to bring it to an end?” (2020: 20). The question has no comfortable answer, and the show does not rush to provide one—although it gives the victim of the retributive ‘justice’ a voice to argue against it in Episode VIII. What it does instead is stage the contradiction precisely: the collective is not the answer to the problem of oppression, it is the terrain on which that problem has to be fought out, again, by the people who are also its products.25A thorough exploration of the internal contradictions of the laboring class in its effort for liberation is beyond the scope of this thesis. For a comprehensive overview of the multiplicity and intersection of struggles within the oppressed strata of society, see Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (2016).

Across four seasons, Black Sails does more than ‘represent’ the historical reality of the destruction of the Republic of Pirates; it makes a claim about why Nassau fell. It identifies moments where things could have gone the other way and illustrates why they did not, depicting both unfavorable material conditions and the uneven development of consciousness across a population that never quite achieved it at the moment it required it—the slow working-out of contradictions that were there from the beginning. This is a materialist account of historical defeat, and the show enacts it through the accumulated weight of specific people making specific choices under specific conditions, across enough time that the viewer has lived with the consequences of those choices before their full significance becomes visible.

This is an affordance of the serialized format that other forms cannot replicate in the same register. A four-season arc is not a longer version of a shorter argument. It is a different kind of argument: one whose evidence is duration itself, the slow accumulation of character and consequence that makes Nassau’s fall feel, by the time it arrives, like something that had to happen this way even though it did not have to happen at all. Rosenstone’s assertion that we must interrogate what kind of historical world the historical film constructs finds its fullest application here: Black Sails constructs a world in which the crushing of the pirates was the outcome of a struggle, which means it was also, always, the outcome of choices. The historical method Black Sails seems to subscribe to, in line with Thompsonian social history, is one that asserts both a materialist conception of conditions and the agency of historical subjects. The show’s use of multi-perspective narrative is also in line with this approach in contrast with ‘great man’ history, in a meta-narrative ideological commitment to storytelling ‘from below’.

Notes
25
A thorough exploration of the internal contradictions of the laboring class in its effort for liberation is beyond the scope of this thesis. For a comprehensive overview of the multiplicity and intersection of struggles within the oppressed strata of society, see Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (2016).
Part Two  ·  Chapter VI
Chapter VI  ·  Part Two

No Happy Plantations

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

— W.E.B. Du Bois, , The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
6.1  Until some of us are safe: the problem of race

The preceding chapter traced the emergence of collective consciousness and radicalism from material conditions and struggle, and identified the primary obstacle to that emergence as false consciousness in its various forms: the reformist illusion that the system can be changed from within, the accommodationist logic that mistakes partial recognition for genuine power, the individualism that cannot subordinate personal interest to collective survival, as well as the difficulty in building a collective subject out of people the system has already divided. What that last move hints at is the existence of contradictions within the laboring class itself, which is not uniform and is divided into subgroups along lines of ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and even trade. These subgroups can and often do have competing short-term interests, which severely complicates any revolutionary effort. 

As the section on race as a technology of social management retraced in Chapter 2, from the seventeenth century onward the ruling class enforced the order necessary for the accumulation of profit demanded by mercantilism and eventually capitalism by dividing the exploited from each other, and in the Atlantic world Black Sails stages, the main instrument of that division was race. The motley crew that Chapter 2 established as the historical subject of Atlantic resistance was threatening to the colonial order beyond its disruption of commerce because it demonstrated that those divided by ethnic and racial lines could recognize common interest. The final two seasons of the show are organized around this structural argument, as the main source of narrative conflict is the tension between the Maroons and the pirates. What Black Sails dramatizes in its final movement is what happens when that resistance encounters its own internal limits: the extractive racial logic born out of slavery and colonial subjugation does not disappear inside the revolutionary project; it has to be actively overcome, and not everyone overcomes it. The show recognizes this asymmetry explicitly through one of its enslaved characters in Episode XXXV: “what happens when our enemy realizes that all it needs to do to defeat us is to take away that common cause? Turn one against the other. And when that happens... which of us standing here are likely to be the ones who benefit and which the ones sold back into their chains?”

The theoretical framework underpinning this chapter’s analysis is drawn from Stuart Hall’s argument in “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980) that race is the 

modality in which class is lived, the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’. This has consequences for the whole class, not specifically for its ‘racially defined’ segment. It has consequences in terms of the internal fractioning and division within the working class which, among other ways, are articulated in part through race. This is no mere racist conspiracy from above. For racism is also one of the dominant means of ideological representation through which the white fractions of the class come to ‘live’ their relations to other fractions, and through them to capital itself. Those who seek, with effect, to disarticulate some of the existing syntaxes of class struggle […] and to rearticulate class experience through the condensed interpellations of a racist ideological syntax are, of course, key agents in this work of ideological transformation—this is the ideological class struggle, pursued, precisely, through harnessing the dominated classes to capital by means of the articulation of the internal contradictions of class experience with racism. (Hall, 1980: 341)

Hall’s point is not simply that race divides the working class from outside, but that race becomes one of the ways class position is subjectively experienced and politically misrecognized. Applied to the eighteenth-century Atlantic, this means a class politics adequate to a world regimented by racial extractive logics therefore has to be simultaneously a politics of racial liberation; the two cannot be disentangled without falsifying the terrain on which the struggle is taking place. 

This chapter moves through three related arguments. The first and second, organized around Billy Bones and Flint, examines the show’s engagement with race as the primary contradiction within the laboring class. The third tracks what survives the defeat that contradiction helps produce—the articulation of a collective political subject that outlasts the individuals who built it—and returns to the show’s own meta-narrative, the question of what stories survive and why. 

As was established in the previous chapters, Billy serves an important purpose within the movement that Flint is building: even before Flint closes the door on reformism, Billy is already speaking the language of radical collective politics, and he is the catalyst for Vane’s actualization. Most importantly, he is also a paragon of rationality and ethics: he bypasses his personal feelings and grievances in favor of collective interest, and extends solidarity and protection to members of his class regardless of interpersonal conflict. There is a certain ambiguity as to whether Flint pushed him overboard at the end of Season 1, but it is a fact that he at the very least let him fall into the sea and did not attempt to search for him or rescue him, leading to Billy’s traumatic capture by the English. That Billy is able to push his distaste and resentment for his captain aside after this because this is what the cause demands shows a great deal of political clarity and ideological commitment to the struggle. 

This commitment is tested in Episode XXX, in the aftermath of the failed pirate invasion of Nassau. The pirates have taken the Underhill plantation at night, a costly operation that lost them six men, and are now debating what to do with it. Billy wants to hold it: the supplies they have seized make them better resourced than the British in Nassau, and he lost men taking it. Flint wants to retreat and strike directly at Nassau. Before that argument can be resolved, Madi explains what a house slave has informed her of: after Mr. Scott’s weapons stockpile was discovered, the plantation owners separated slave families across multiple estates as a deterrent. If any estate falls, the family members of those slaves, held on other plantations, will be tortured or killed. The calculus is straightforward: taking and holding the Underhill plantation means condemning the families of people supposedly included in the liberation efforts of the pirate-maroon alliance. Flint and Madi agree they must retreat. Billy disagrees: his people are hungry and have already sacrificed much in the assault. He orders his men to stand their ground and arrest Flint. What follows is an armed standoff between those loyal to Billy and those loyal to Flint and Madi, pirates pointing pistols at each other over the question of whether enslaved people are an acceptable cost of military advantage. 

Billy does not articulate a racial hierarchy at any point in the show. He does not say these lives matter less. But the structure of his decision makes the hierarchy legible: the same man who told Vane that personal grievance had to be subordinated to collective survival—“you hate Flint, I hate Flint” (XVII)—finds that principle does not extend to enslaved people when their interest conflicts with the interest of the people he considers his own, even when materially he has entered an alliance with these people and should thus be englobing them in his understanding of the struggle. It would be easy to read this uniquely through the lens of feeling (it is understandable to prioritize the wellbeing of people who are known rather than strangers), but the character making this decision on screen has demonstrably overridden personal feeling before when the structural argument was bigger than the interpersonal one. 

Beyond being a morally reprehensible act, Billy’s decision to complete the raid on the Underhill plantation is also strategically poorly thought-out: it leads to a fracture in the movement, as the plantation slave Julius predictably and understandably refuses to join the cause and instead forms his own guerilla army that actively sabotages the pirates. Billy, mostly indifferent to the horrors of slavery, does not view the slaves as subjected to the extractive logic pirates are fighting against; he thus cannot see them as comrades in arms, which would make him consider their wellbeing before making decisions. His strategic failure follows directly from his political failure: because he could not compute the slaves as comrades, he also does not compute the political cost of treating them as expendable. Billy’s failure at the Underhill estate is an articulation of Hall’s argument in narrative form: his class politics are real, but they are lived through a racial syntax that limits who can appear to him as part of said class.

6.2  Bring it all down: Flint’s arc as race treason26I use “race treason” here in the sense developed by Noel Ignatiev throughout his body of work; not as a claim about moral purity, but to describe Flint’s movement away from the political interests of whiteness and toward an identification with the enslaved and maroon struggle as the necessary condition of his own revolutionary project.

The morning after Flint sides with Madi over Billy at the Underhill plantation, she names what he did: “you did not have to side with me. It was costly for you to do so”. His answer reframes that cost entirely: 

Well, it would have cost far more for me not to have done so. We might be able to take Nassau alone, but there will be no greater victory, no widespread revolution unless we can somehow keep our alliance together. (Madi: You truly believe it is possible?  That as disadvantaged and disabled as we are, that anything we do here is going to make the least bit of difference to the men in London?)  Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? If no one remembers a time before there was an England, then no one can imagine a time after it. The empire survives in part because we believe its survival to be inevitable. But it isn’t. And they know that.  That’s why they’re so terrified of you and I. If we were able to take Nassau, if we are able to expose the illusion that England is not inevitable, if we are able to incite a revolt that spreads across the New World... then, yeah. I imagine people are gonna notice. (XXXI, 10:59-12:22)

 

The grammar of “you and I” is the argument: not you with my support, not your cause and mine running parallel, but a single indivisible threat to Empire. Flint has arrived at a position where the slave revolt and the pirate revolt are the same revolt, where the liberation of the enslaved is not a cause he supports from the outside but the condition of possibility for his own war’s success—and more than that, it is the political content of his revolution.

This is what Billy cannot see and what Stuart Hall’s framework helps name. The enslaved are outside his recognition not because Billy is indifferent to their suffering in any simple moral sense, but because race is the modality through which he lives his class position, which means the boundary of his solidarity is drawn by racial structure without him perceiving it as such; because he cannot comprehend total unfreedom and negation of personhood as classed realities, only as unfortunate and unfair circumstances imposed on an Other he does not relate to in any way. Flint’s boundary is drawn differently, because he has analytically deconstructed his positioning and the mechanisms of power that keep him subjugated as part of a wider structure operating adaptatively across a single exploitative logic. 

Two characterization elements distinguish Flint’s capacity to arrive where Billy cannot. The first is analytical. In a Season 2 flashback, Thomas Hamilton states that after canvassing Flint’s superiors in the Navy, he has found that despite having no record of formal schooling, Lieutenant McGraw is more well-read than “any three boys” he knew at Eton College (IX, 17:36). This is the show establishing that Flint’s intellectual framework is self-made rather than credentialed, built through reading and observation rather than received as cultural inheritance. This matters because self-made frameworks tend to be more portable: they can be applied to new situations rather than just confirming existing assumptions. And Flint has already demonstrated, as Chapter 4 established, that he understands how Empire reproduces itself through ideology before he becomes one of its targets—“civilization needs its monsters” (IX, 25:18) is said by a serving naval officer, not a pirate. Similarly, he grasps that the slave trade is not adjacent to the system he is fighting but its engine: the profit slavery generates is what funds the imperial power that designates him a monster and hunts him across the Atlantic. Taking Nassau back without destroying slavery leaves the engine running. This is the structural argument for why the slaves’ liberation is his liberation, and Flint can make it because he thinks in structural terms.

The second distinction is positional. As a gay man in the eighteenth century, Flint legally cannot be his authentic self. This is not to suggest homophobia as equivalence with enslavement; but there is a structural proximity here that matters analytically. He has lived inside the category of legally negated personhood in a way that makes the argument for the enslaved not abstract but experientially intelligible to him. The bargain Empire offers him—compliance in exchange for partial restoration, the same bargain Eleanor takes without fully understanding she is taking it—is one he has already refused at enormous cost, and he refused it in part because what he would have to surrender to accept it includes the people and the project that were taken from him. His politics and his personal grievance are not separable, which means the deal is intolerable to him in a way it was not for Eleanor; he says so verbatim to Miranda in Episode VII, when she argues for exactly what Eleanor wants as well. 

“There is a life in Boston,” she tells him. “There is joy there and music and peace. The door is open. I’ve opened it for you.  And it requires no war and no blood and no sacrifice.”

“It requires an intolerable sacrifice,” Flint answers.  

“To accept a pardon?” she asks, confused. 

“To apologize,” he replies.  

“Apologize? Who will you be apologizing to?” 

“To England! They took everything from us. And then they called me a monster. The moment I sign that pardon, the moment I ask for one, I proclaim to the world that they were right. This ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around.” (35:21-36:30)

 

The arc through which Flint’s analytical capacity becomes political action runs from recognition to identification to action to articulation. In Episode XXIII, appealing to the Maroon Queen for an alliance, Flint draws the equation explicitly for the first time: “England takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. Lives. Loves. Labor. Spirits. Homes. It has taken them from me. I imagine that it has taken it from you”. The list is remarkable: it places Thomas and Miranda in the same grammatical structure as the enslaved people’s stolen labor and freedom, without hierarchy between them. When the Maroon Queen asks, unconvinced, if he is “suggesting that [he] could help [them] prevent England from taking these things”, he outlines the strategic benefit of solidarity across the color line, and frames it as restitution against Empire’s extractive logic: “No, I am suggesting that we help each other start taking things back, and it starts with Nassau” (XXIII, 37:00-38:13).

 

Flint further elucidates this when the Maroon Queen expresses doubt about their odds going up against an entire empire: 

For every man in your camp, there are thousands somewhere in the West Indies living under the same yoke, chained in fields, pressed on ships, sold into indenture.  When they see a sitting governor protected by His Majesty's Navy, deposed by an alliance of pirates and slaves, how many consider joining that fight?  How many thousands of men will flock to Nassau, join your ranks, and help you defend it?  What does a colonial power do when the men whose toil powers it lay down their shovels, take up swords, and say, "No more"?  Bring down Nassau, maybe you bring it all down. (XXIII, 39:23-40:23)

 

By Episode XXIV, the arc is visible in a smaller register: when tension erupts on the Walrus over an African crewman blamed for a rigging failure, Flint shuts it down: “if he tied it wrong, then you instructed him wrong” (XXIV, 05:28). He refuses the racial scapegoating logic inside his own crew, matter-of-factly, as if it were simply obvious. By Episode XXX, the arc produces its decisive action: Flint sides with Madi over Billy at real military cost, absorbing the fracture in the white pirate alliance rather than accepting the cost to enslaved families that Billy’s decision would require. And by Episode XXXI, the morning after, he can articulate what he has been doing and why.

The end Flint meets in the finale is a devastating but thematically fitting conclusion for such an arc. In Episode XXXVIII, Silver narrates to Madi what happened on Skeleton Island where the treasure is now buried, to explain to her where Flint, unseen since, has disappeared to. He tells her that he discovered that Thomas Hamilton was not dead but had been held in a private facility near Savannah, where wealthy English families sent inconvenient relatives to disappear. Silver says he used this information to break Flint, allowing the promise of reunion to erode Flint’s will to fight, and delivering him to the plantation where Thomas is held captive. The image the show provides is Silver’s narration made visual: Flint in chains, arriving at the plantation, seeing Thomas laboring the field, the two men embracing and weeping. Silver insists he did this as an act of love—that he returned Flint to the man he was before the loss, undid the tragedy that made Captain Flint, gave him back what England had taken. “I found a way to reach into the past”, he tells Madi, “and undo it” (XXXVIII, 51:34-55:45). 

 

“You killed him,” Madi cries as she is told. Black Sails poses the apparent ambiguity of Flint’s fate as a deliberate hermeneutic challenge. The image on screen is accompanied by Silver’s voice off it—it is what he tells Madi he did, not a transparent account the show necessarily endorses. And the show has given the careful viewer every tool to interrogate it. Silver is established in Episode I as a liar and a masterful narrator whose relationship to truth is entirely instrumental; his entire Season 4 arc is organized around the gap between the myth of Long John Silver and the reality of the man underneath it. More pressingly, Jack Rackham’s closing monologue of “a story is true, a story is untrue. […] The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive” (XXXVIII, 1:00:34-1:01:22) arrives almost immediately after Silver’s account, which is the show flagging that what we have just been given is a story someone needed to tell rather than a record of what happened. The image of Flint weeping with joy in chains on a plantation is so cognitively dissonant with everything the show has built, with Flint’s explicit refusal of bending the knee, his stated commitment to fighting until England departs his island, his understanding that the war he is fighting is inseparable from the liberation of the enslaved, that the dissonance is itself the argument. A show that has spent four seasons demonstrating there are no happy endings on plantations cannot be asking the viewer to take this one at face value.

 

What Silver’s story reveals, regardless of its literal truth, is his fundamental misreading of Flint. He believes he can “unmake” Captain Flint by returning him to the pre-revolution state: McGraw before the loss, the man Miranda once offered a life in Boston to, the man who could have taken the pardon and disappeared into quiet exile. This reading of Flint is only coherent if his revolution is understood as entirely reactive: grief weaponized, a wound that can be healed by restoring what was lost. Silver has spent four seasons closer to Flint than almost anyone, and this is still all he sees. He cannot hold the story of what Flint’s war has become—a war whose content, as this chapter has argued, is the liberation of the enslaved as the condition of possibility for any meaningful revolution against British imperialism and the economic system that sustains it across the Atlantic. Silver cannot hold it because holding it would require understanding his own structural position within it, which he never does, like Billy never does. Silver reduces Flint’s arc to its origin because that is the only version of the story he has the tools to tell. 

The plantation image is therefore Silver’s fantasy, not the show’s conclusion. It is the story he tells Madi—and perhaps himself—because it allows him to live with himself. The guess an attentive reader will make is that Flint, just as Madi fears, died on Skeleton Island. That he is buried with his treasure, in an unmarked grave. The only version of events in which Silver’s story is true is the one in which we accept Silver’s reading of Flint, and the show has given us four seasons of evidence to do otherwise. He has ideals now that are not reducible to the loss that generated them. But even if we take Silver’s version in practical terms, that he somehow subdued Flint and delivered him to Savannah, Flint is metaphorically dead. His true self has been extinguished. The man Silver pretends he is returning Flint to, a McGraw grieving and willing to disappear, no longer exists as such, and to remove Flint from his revolution is to reduce him to nothing.

Notes
26
I use “race treason” here in the sense developed by Noel Ignatiev throughout his body of work; not as a claim about moral purity, but to describe Flint’s movement away from the political interests of whiteness and toward an identification with the enslaved and maroon struggle as the necessary condition of his own revolutionary project.
6.3  The landscape after cruelty: revolutionary optimism

the knives in the kitchen are singing
for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is
a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me
tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.

— Richard Siken, “Snow and Dirty Rain” in Crush (2015)

 

By the end of the series, the war is lost in every measurable sense. Rogers holds Nassau. The pirate-maroon alliance has fractured. Flint is gone. The Republic of Pirates, the experiment in collective self-governance that the preceding chapters have analyzed as a historically grounded challenge to early Atlantic capitalism and the racial order sustaining it, has been destroyed. What remains to be asked is what survives a defeat of this kind, and whether the show’s answer to that question constitutes more than consolation.

The structure Antonio Gramsci identified as the condition of genuine political commitment, his famous “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (1920), runs through the show’s final two seasons as epistemology: that one must understand the situation clearly, evaluate material conditions accurately even when the result of that evaluation is unpleasant as it often is for the oppressed, and fight anyway. The fullest illustration of this comes in Episode XXXVI, in a late-night conversation between Flint and Silver on Skeleton Island that is also, in retrospect, the show’s most precise account of what the revolutionary project is. Silver asks the hardest version of the pessimist’s question: what if the war itself is the horror, not a transition to something beyond it? What if there is no after? Flint’s answer refuses false comfort as well as surrender:

If we are to truly reach a moment where we might be finished with England… cleared away to make room for something else... there most certainly lies a dark moment between here and there. A moment of terror... where everything appears to be without hope. I know this. But I cannot believe that that is all there is. I cannot believe we are so poorly made as that. Incapable of surviving in the state to which we are born. Grown so used to the yoke that there can be no progress without it. (XXXVI, 09:25-10:25)

 

“I know this” is the pessimism of the intellect: Flint is not denying what Silver is describing. What follows is the optimism of the will: not faith in the naive sense, as Flint himself clarifies verbatim, but a refusal to accept that human beings cannot survive without the structures that oppress them. And most importantly, immediately, the optimism is grounded in material analysis, in Flint’s evaluation of both the revolution’s strategic capacity and of the necessity for an educated vanguard we traced in Chapter 5: “We’ll have the right people in place to lead us through it and hold the world together while it finds its balance”. Crucially, Flint deflects Silver’s assumption that Flint himself is the center of this vanguard; instead he identifies Madi as the most advanced cadre of the revolution. “She’s as wise as her father,” he says. ‘She’s as strong as her mother. There isn’t a man or woman in Nassau who’d argue that she isn’t the best of them all.” Further yet, Flint tells Silver that “[Silver and Madi] together are the world in balance” (XXXVI, 10:40-11:49), asserting his belief that the ideal world is one where the color line is dissolved, personified in the intellectual and political joining of a white pirate and a Black enslaved woman. 

Flint’s assessment of Madi has been earned on screen. Her political formation precedes the pirate alliance entirely: her father, Mr. Scott, spent years giving her, as he tells her on his deathbed, “the one thing that no one could ever take away, and that would make you strong enough to understand their world, interact with their world... wage war on their world” (XXIV, 43:15-45:09). In Episode XXXVII, captured by Rogers and offered her freedom in exchange for the pirates’ surrender, Madi refuses:

I hear […] a chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who’d lost their lives to men like you. Men and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them. And this war—their war, Flint’s war, my war… it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight, to save John Silver’s life, or his men’s, or mine. (XXXVII, 23:33-24:36)

 

The political subject Madi articulates is the enslaved as a historical force engaged in a centuries-long struggle, which precedes the fight for Nassau and will continue after it. A glum reading of Black Sails through the narrow lens of the specific historical defeat of the Republic of Pirates is myopic because one of the struggles it stages historically did produce revolutionary victory: the end of the eighteenth century sees the victory of the Haitian Revolution; and later the formal abolition of slavery across the Atlantic world.

The most sustained scholarly reading of the show’s ending, Jessica Walker’s chapter “Civilization’s Monsters: The Doomed Queer Anti-Imperialism of Black Sails” in Pirates in History and Popular Culture (2018), provides a useful entry point into the show’s formal optimism. Walker reads piracy in the show as a queer enterprise in the theoretical sense, not simply in terms of non-heteronormative sexuality, but in queer theory’s broader sense of resistance to assimilation and binary categorization, defiance of dominant ways of thinking, “potential to challenge normative knowledges and practices” (Sullivan, cited in Walker, 2018: 204). Pirates existed, as Walker notes drawing on Leeson and Rediker, in a “geographically and socially queer space”—legally designated enemies of all mankind, denied the protections of legitimate citizenship, organizing themselves according to principles of collective ownership and democratic self-governance that stood in explicit opposition to the hierarchical world of the metropole (Walker, 2018: 204). Walker explicitly links literal queerness to the ‘metaphorical’ queerness of anti-imperialist praxis:

Throughout its four seasons, heteronormative relationships are tied to colonialism’s greed and abuses, while queer relationships are linked to the idealism, adventure, and freedom from social constraints valued in the pirates’ “New World.” The series prominently features two polyamorous relationships between characters of different sexual identities and social backgrounds, joined both by their love for one another and their resistance to the pressures of imperialism, just as cooperation and equal treatment regardless of status were vital to a functioning pirate crew. (2018: 204)

On this reading, the show’s refusal to constrain its characters within their literary and historical sources is formally significant: the show performs its own queerness by surviving what the dominant narrative says cannot survive. Jack unfurling the Jolly Roger in the series’ final moments is, as Walker observes, a beginning rather than an ending (Walker, 2018: 241). The prequel structure that promised total doom is refused.

Like most scholarly readings of the show, Walker’s analysis does not engage with the racial dimension of the narrative. This thesis has argued that slavery, as the structural center of the Atlantic order Black Sails dramatizes, intrinsically tied into the logic of the show’s anti-imperialist revolutionary argument, is a major axis of analysis crucial to a complete understanding of its political content. Walker for example takes Silver’s version of events in XXXVIII as truth and states that Black Sails leaves all its queer characters alive and happy. But as this chapter has argued, the show gives the careful viewer every reason to read Silver’s narration as a story he needed to tell rather than a transparent account—and what survives the ending, if you center race rather than queerness as the organizing axis, is not a queer utopia intact but Madi alive, answering to voices Silver’s story cannot reach.

The negative proof of the Gramscian argument is Max. Having chosen accommodation over revolution, having betrayed the pirate alliance at a critical moment, she draws the conclusion that her choice has confirmed for her: “civilization has been winning that war for years against men richer, braver, stronger, and smarter than you”. This is presented as realism, the hard-won wisdom of someone who read the situation correctly and acted accordingly in self-preservation. Jack’s answer exposes the circular logic underneath it: “that result was because of your goddamn betrayal” (XXXIV, 50:07-50:51). He is not accepting Max’s material assessment and finding the will to fight anyway. He is rejecting the assessment itself. Civilization did not win because it was invincible; it won in part because Max switched sides, because of the number of people like Max who could not see beyond their fear and imagine a better world, or who were not willing to pay the price for it. The historical losing streak she invokes as proof of structural inevitability is itself partly produced by exactly the kind of choice she made. 

Black Sails has been thinking about narrative as a political instrument since its very beginning. As Silver begins consolidating influence in Nassau, Mr. Scott identifies what makes him dangerous with more precision than anyone else on the island: 

When Captain Flint first arrived on this island, he gained influence faster than any man I’d seen before.  Or since. I heard men say it was because of the violence. I heard them say it was his charm. But it was clear to me the reason why he was so good at bending men towards his will was he knew the power of a story and how to harness it to his own ends.  That  man there, I would argue, may very well be his equal. (XVI, 16:05-16:32)

Billy’s immediate response sharpens the observation further: “at the moment, he’s using it to help the captain. But God help us if he ever realizes what else he could use it to accomplish” (XVI, 16:37-17:11). The show is planting, three seasons before it happens, the seed of Silver’s betrayal as a narrative act. Silver’s power was always the power to tell the story that people want to believe; he is a master propagandist in a show very explicitly concerned with ideologies and political recruitment. 

Silver is written as aware of the power of narrative, and of what goes into building a political message. Of Flint’s reputation as the ‘monster’ he has decided to embody post-Carolina, he says “this crew has spilled a great deal of blood to make your name what it is. It doesn’t belong to you. It’s a jointly held asset belonging to every man on this crew who sacrificed some part of himself to build it” (XIX, 23:45-24:17). The myth of Flint is collective property. The show demonstrates here, well before the question becomes urgent, that ideas outlive the individuals who generate them not simply because these ideas are larger than individuals (though they are), but also because they are generated out of collective praxis. What the crew has built together cannot be owned only by its most visible articulator and therefore cannot be extinguished by his removal. Ironically, Silver will try to do exactly this in the finale, but the show has been telling the viewer consistently why this will not work. 

What the dominant narrative does to defeated revolutionaries is named with complete precision in Flint’s second speech to Silver on Skeleton Island: “all this will be for nothing. We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories, distorted to fit into their narrative... until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children” (XXXVIII, 41:10-42:26). This is Flint naming the fate that Treasure Island has already assigned him, the fearsome dead pirate whose treasure drives a boys’ adventure story. The show knows it is intervening in exactly the process Flint describes: the transformation of defeated revolutionaries into monsters, the domestication of political challenge into genre entertainment. 

 

The counter-move is also demonstrated inside the show. In Episode XXXV, Jack encounters a young woman who recounts what she has read in newspapers about Charles Vane: that he butchered his enemies for amusement, made stew of their flesh, was “truly an animal”. Jack’s response is quiet and exact: “Charles Vane was a good man. What I told you was the truth. Put down the newspapers and read a book.” “Truth isn’t nearly as interesting,” the girl retorts. (XXXV, 22:03-24:27). The monster narrative circulates through popular media in real time, turning a man Jack loved into a figure of sensational horror. His counter-narrative—Vane was brave, loyal, honest in a world where honesty is casually disregarded—is the same move the show itself makes against the entire tradition of pirate romance. This is Black Sails commenting on its own project through Jack: the story that survives in popular culture is an account that does not care for the pirates’ humanity, and correcting it requires someone willing to say so. In the storyworld, this falls to Jack. In our world, this is a labor undertaken by historians like Rediker, and filmmakers like Steinberg and Levine. 

Jack understands that controlling narrative is not only a cultural matter but a political one. In the finale, having defeated Rogers financially through a deal with Eleanor’s grandmother Mrs. Guthrie, he asks one further thing: “once the time comes to submit that affidavit, I’d so love to help you write it” (XXXVIII, 48:05-49:11). The official record of Rogers’ failure, the story history will tell about him, is itself a weapon, and Jack wants to be the one who wields it. The man who began the series as a quartermaster scheming for treasure ends it understanding that shaping the historical record is the most durable form of power available to him.

Jack’s closing monologue gathers all of this into the show’s final statement about its own project: 

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity, which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create. (XXXVIII, 1:00:34-1:01:22).

 

Rather than relativism about historical truth, in the context of the near forty hours of television that have preceded it, we must understand Jack’s musing as a statement about how historical meaning is produced and who produces it. The stories that survive are not the most accurate ones, but the ones people choose to keep alive, which means the fight over historical narrative is never settled and is always political. Black Sails is making an explicit claim about its own place in that fight: it is the story of Nassau that survives through the excavation of the historical record by historians dedicated to recovering suppressed voices, against the version Treasure Island fixed in popular consciousness, insisting that truth can be found in its maturity even if it was distorted at its birth.

The real ‘Calico Jack’ and his crew have historically played a significant part in the constitution of the pirate myth: Rackham was credited (most likely wrongly) for designing the crossed swords Jolly Roger as we remember it today (Little, 2016), and famous for having had two women crewmates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. That the show uses his fictional counterpart to explicitly name the mythmaking process feels intentional. Jack’s final words before the show cuts to the historical Jolly Roger are to Anne: “what’s it all for if it goes unremembered? It’s the art that leaves the mark. But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true” (XXXVIII, 1:06:30-1:06:55). The camera pans then to the skull and crossed swords, the flag that has circulated as a symbol of pirate resistance and radical defiance for three centuries. The mark was left. 

 

 

 

Conclusion
Conclusion

The Stories that Survive

Black Sails is Marxist art. Not in the sense that its characters are Marxists, or that it offers a programmatic political conclusion, or that it resolves the contradictions it stages into a clean revolutionary outcome. It is Marxist in the sense Fredric Jameson (1981) means in The Political Unconscious: it makes social relations visible as social relations. It shows who produces value and who extracts it, how race and class articulate together to organize the Atlantic world, why the suppression of Nassau was necessary for Atlantic capitalism to consolidate. The characters do not need to understand the system they inhabit for the show to make that system legible. Billy does not know he is living his class position through a racial syntax. Eleanor does not know that her vulnerability is a racial privilege. Silver does not know that his reading of Flint is a racial misreading. The show knows these things and shows them to us, and the gap between what the characters know and what the text knows is precisely where the historical argument lives.

This is the structure Ernst Bloch (1986) identified as the ground of genuine political art: not the representation of a world already transformed, but the insistence, against the evidence of defeat, that transformation remains possible—what he called “educated hope”, grounded not in faith but in the materialist refusal to accept that human beings are so poorly made as to be incapable of surviving without the structures that oppress them. And it is what Walter Benjamin meant by “blasting open the continuum of history”: recovering past moments of resistance from the narrative of inevitable progress, insisting that their defeat was contingent rather than necessary, returning them to the present as proof that things have been otherwise and therefore can be otherwise again (Benjamin, 1968: 262). Black Sails performs both operations on the Golden Age of piracy. The Treasure Island tradition buried Nassau under romance and individualism; the show blasts it open, recovers the political content, and insists that what the Republic of Pirates demonstrated—that different social organization was possible—cannot be fully extinguished by military defeat, because it happened. The historical record of what was possible is itself a political resource.

What the preceding chapters have demonstrated is that this is not a reading imposed on the show from outside. It is the reading the show invites and survives. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 have read Black Sails against Rediker, Policante, Hall, etc., and found that the show’s arguments about Empire, consciousness, race, and revolution are coherent, historically grounded, and evaluable against the scholarly literature. The “appropriate question” Rosenstone identifies in Visions of the Past, that of which historical world is constructed by visual media and how, has been asked here, and answered. The historical world Black Sails constructs has a specific causal grammar: Nassau fell not because defeat was structurally inevitable but because of specific contradictions that were themselves the product of the Atlantic order the show is analyzing. That is a historiographical argument, made in visual and narrative form.

Chapter 3 established that pirate narratives have never been apolitical; that from Johnson’s General History through Treasure Island to the present, the figure of the pirate has always been a site where questions about hierarchy, resistance, and sovereignty are worked out, and that Black Sails intervenes in this tradition consciously and from the opposite direction to Stevenson. What this thesis has added is a framework for reading that intervention rigorously from the perspective of the historian, as historiophoty. That framework matters because, as Rosenstone observed, “it is clear that […] there is a rapidly shrinking general audience for the information we have to deliver and the sorts of stories we have to tell. Stories that matter to people outside our profession. Stories that really matter to people inside the profession. Stories that matter at all” (Rosenstone, 1995: 24). Popular visual media is where historical consciousness is largely formed for that shrinking general audience. When historians abandon that terrain, they cede it.

The critical reception framework this thesis has mobilized hopefully does something more specific than situating Black Sails within a tradition of popular historiography. It establishes that the relationship between the show and the Atlantic past is dialogic—that the show does not simply represent the eighteenth century but enters into an active conversation with it, one in which the present determines what the past can mean and the past determines what the present can say. This is Loraux’s “controlled use of anachronism” as historical method: the recognition that the present is not a contamination of historical understanding but its most powerful motor, that accepting that there is an unavoidable degree of presentism to historical analysis enriches it, does not weaken it. Black Sails works this way deliberately: its 2014-2017 political horizon—the post-2008 resurgence of anti-capitalist politics, the renewed insistence on racial capitalism as an analytical category, the refusal of ‘There Is No Alternative’—is not noise around the historical signal but the condition that makes the signal legible. The show handles the historical record knowingly, ideologically, from the political present, to talk about a past that in many ways is the present. And the historical record, recovered by scholars like Rediker and Policante and Linebaugh, gives the show’s contemporary argument its grounding, prevents it from being merely presentist, and roots its politics in what actually happened in the eighteenth century. Neither the show nor the history is primary to the analysis here. The meaning is in the movement between them, which is what reception, properly understood, names and explicitates.

This thesis has limits that are worth naming. It reads one show through one interpretive framework, and the richness of that reading is also its narrowness: a Jamesonian Marxist analysis will find the contradictions it is looking for, and Black Sails is accommodating enough to reward the search generously. A different framework or a combination of this framework with another—psychoanalytic, postcolonial, ecocritical—would bring up different findings, some of which would complicate or qualify what these chapters have argued. The show’s own production conditions, its commercial constraints, the mostly white writers’ room, and Starz’s network priorities are real material conditions worth engaging with, but beyond the scope of a study of the show that purposefully refused the lens of film studies to make its historiophotic argument. 

The stories that survive are the ones people choose to keep alive. Jack Rackham says this at the end of the series, in the last minute before the historical Jolly Roger appears on screen, as the show makes a claim about its own project: that it has chosen to keep the story of Nassau alive, against the version Treasure Island fixed in popular consciousness, against the tendency of pirate romance to transform political challenge into entertainment. Rediker made the same choice in the archive, recovering pirate voices from trial records and depositions because he understood that recovering them was a political act. This thesis has made the same choice at a different scale: taking seriously a television show’s engagement with history, evaluating its arguments, testing its capacity to convey the core of scholarly historical work to an audience of a size this kind of academic production cannot claim to reach. If historiophoty is reception-history, then this analysis is both: understanding how Black Sails receives and represents the past, and participating in the ongoing reception of that representation. The ‘wretched of the sea’ survive not only in Rediker’s monographs but in the stories we continue to tell about them, and the conversations we have about said stories. 

Abstract
Front matter

Abstract

This thesis argues that Black Sails (Starz, 2014–2017) performs historiophoty—visual history-making in the sense theorized by Hayden White—by translating Marcus Rediker’s Marxist account of Golden Age Atlantic piracy onto the screen. Reading the series dialectically as a cultural text that works through rather than merely reflects the historical contradictions of its moment of production, the thesis demonstrates that Black Sails makes a sustained historiographical argument about the consolidation of capitalism and the violent suppression of Atlantic proletarian self-organization in the eighteenth century. Conceived as a prequel to Treasure Island, the series is read as a deliberate rejoinder to the Victorian domestication of pirate politics that Stevenson’s novel helped consolidate. The thesis proposes critical reception theory, adapted from its development within Classical Studies, as a methodology for treating popular screen media as a legitimate site of historiographical practice, and intervenes in debates about popular historiography and historical consciousness.

Keywords: Black Sails; historiophoty; critical reception theory; Golden Age of piracy; Atlantic history; maritime capitalism; historical television; Marxist literary criticism

Acknowledgements
Front matter

Acknowledgements

The first and most fundamental thank you goes to my advisor Allan Potofsky, whose investment in this project in time, consistency, and genuine intellectual engagement exceeded anything I had the right to expect. He had every reason to remain sceptical of its premises, and never did. 

I thank Clara Manco, whose scholarship on the long eighteenth century and its political and representational dimensions places her exactly where this thesis most needed a reader, for bringing that expertise to a project approaching her period from an unusual direction.

I want to also thank the teaching staff of the Anglophone Studies department at UPC; I have learned so much these past two years, and mostly in joy. You have opened horizons for me. 

My cohort, as well; what a pleasure it has been to share halls and conversations and Moodle boards and celebrations and miseries. I will miss you tremendously. 

The support of my friends Alma, Amélie, Dia, Jules, Luna, and Nikki, who have all borne witness to the absurd maieutic process of my writing, has meant more to me than I think they can imagine. Of the countless hours spent with you, none were wasted. 

To my sister Diotima: there are no pleases or thank yous between us. The English language is not vast enough. No language could be. 

Equally difficult would be to put into words what my parents gave me before any classroom did: the understanding that intellectual curiosity is inseparable from empathy, and that knowledge is an infinite resource that we have the responsibility to redistribute. This thesis is, at its core, an argument about exactly that. I am eternally grateful.

And finally to my Lou, who keeps me fed and rested and alert—without love there would be no work. Yours finds its way into every page. 

This thesis is dedicated to the memories of my jiddo and my papou, outlaws of their own eras. The point, after all, is indeed to change it.

Appendix I — Principal Characters
Appendix I

Principal Characters

Captain James Flint (Toby Stephens). The protagonist of the series, born James McGraw, a former officer of the Royal Navy whose transformation into the most feared pirate captain of the Caribbean is one of the show’s central mysteries.

John Silver (Luke Arnold). A merchant sailor and opportunist who joins the Walrus crew by chance in the opening episode, in possession of the schedule of the Urca de Lima. Over the course of four seasons he is transformed from a self-serving schemer into the charismatic and dangerous figure who will become Long John Silver of Stevenson’s novel. His alliance with Flint—uneasy, mutually exploitative, and genuinely complicated by loyalty and affection—is the dramatic spine of the series.

Eleanor Guthrie (Hannah New). The de facto ruler of Nassau’s port commerce. Daughter of the merchant Richard Guthrie, she controls the fencing of pirate plunder and is consequently one of the most powerful figures on the island regardless of any formal title. Her shifting alliances—with Flint, with Vane, and eventually with the colonial governor Woodes Rogers, whom she marries—track the broader political transformations of Nassau across the series.

Mr. Scott (Hakeem Kae-Kazim). Formerly Richard Guthrie’s house slave, Mr. Scott is Eleanor Guthrie’s right-hand man, who, though entrusted with many high-level responsibilities and despite his close relationship with Eleanor, was never manumitted neither by Eleanor, nor her father. It is later revealed that he has secretly been the bridge between Nassau and a large maroon camp where his own daughter and wife reside. 

Madi (Zethu Dlomo). Daughter of Mr. Scott and the Maroon Queen, and leader of the community of escaped and freed slaves hidden on an uncharted island near New Providence. She becomes Silver’s partner and a pivotal figure in the alliance between the pirates and the Maroon community that drives the final two seasons.

Charles Vane (Zach McGowan). A rival pirate captain and one of the series’ most uncompromising figures. Volatile and brutally principled, he resists every accommodation with colonial authority and is ultimately executed for it. 

Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) and Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). Based on the historical pirates of the same names, Rackham is Vane’s former quartermaster: politically agile, commercially minded, and often the series’ shrewdest operator. Bonny is a formidable fighter and Rackham’s devoted partner. 

Max (Jessica Parker Kennedy). Born into slavery as the child of a female slave and a slave-owner, at the start of the show Max is portrayed as a prostitute in one of Nassau’s main brothels. Through her cunning and knack for playing both sides and with aspirations for a better life, Max quickly climbs ranks to eventually become Madame of the brothel, and eventually ends up owning other enterprises in Nassau, filling the vacuum Eleanor’s downfall leaves behind. 

Miranda Barlow / Hamilton (Louise Barnes). A cultivated English widow living on the outskirts of Nassau and Flint’s closest confidante. She was formerly Lady Miranda Hamilton, and her backstory is inseparable from Flint’s own: together with her husband Thomas Hamilton, she and Flint shared an intimate and political bond that ended in catastrophe when it was discovered by the English establishment.

Thomas Hamilton (Rupert Penry-Jones). An English lord and political visionary whose reformist project haunts the show’s narrative from the moment it is introduced. Believed dead after being committed to a mental institution by his father, his fate is not resolved until the series finale.

Woodes Rogers (Luke Roberts). The historical Governor of the Bahamas, introduced in season three as the Crown’s instrument for reclaiming Nassau. He arrives with a fleet, a royal pardon for compliant pirates, and Eleanor Guthrie as his partner and eventual wife. 

Billy Bones (Tom Hopper). The Walrus’s boatswain, a young man of genuine moral conviction whose faith in Flint is progressively eroded over the course of the series. In the later seasons he becomes an independent political operator, eventually working against both Flint and Silver.

Appendix II — Narrative Overview
Appendix II

Narrative Overview of Black Sails

Black Sails is a four-season television series set primarily in and around Nassau, on New Providence Island, in the early eighteenth century. The series follows pirate crews, merchants, colonial authorities, and enslaved and formerly enslaved people as they struggle over the future of Nassau. Although the series begins as a treasure narrative centered on Captain Flint’s pursuit of the Spanish galleon Urca de Lima, it gradually expands into a broader account of the contest between imperial authority and pirate autonomy. The series also functions as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: several of its central figures, including Captain Flint, John Silver, and Billy Bones, are positioned in relation to the later fictional world of Stevenson’s novel.

The narrative opens with Flint’s ship, the Walrus, pursuing a British merchant vessel. Flint is not primarily interested in the ship itself, but in a page from the captain’s logbook containing information about the Urca de Lima, part of the part of the 1715 Treasure Fleet and carrying a vast quantity of gold. During the attack, John Silver, then a member of the merchant crew, obtains the missing page without initially understanding its significance. He joins Flint’s crew, misrepresenting himself as a cook, while secretly retaining the information Flint needs. Flint, meanwhile, faces a crisis of authority: his crew is dissatisfied with his recent failures, and a rival, Singleton, threatens to replace him as captain. Flint survives the challenge through deception and violence, falsely implicating Singleton in the theft of the page and killing him in a duel. He then presents the pursuit of the Urca de Lima to the crew as a prize that could make them “princes of the New World”. 

Nassau is introduced as the unstable center of the pirate economy. Eleanor Guthrie, daughter of the merchant Richard Guthrie, acts as a crucial intermediary between pirate crews and legitimate commerce, buying stolen goods and converting them into usable wealth. Her position depends on maintaining working relationships with violent and competing captains, including Flint and Charles Vane. Vane operates with Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny, and his romantic history with Eleanor complicates both personal and political alliances on the island. Max, a mixed-race prostitute initially connected to Eleanor through both intimacy and business, becomes involved in Silver’s attempt to sell the stolen Urca schedule and is subsequently caught in the struggle among Silver, Flint, Vane, Rackham, and Eleanor. These early conflicts establish Nassau as a place where personal relationships, economic survival, and political power cannot be separated.

The first season follows Flint’s effort to recover the information Silver has taken and to prepare an expedition against the Urca de Lima. Silver, recognizing that the page is valuable, attempts to use it for profit and self-preservation. When Flint and his allies close in on him, Silver burns the page after memorizing its contents, thereby making himself indispensable. Flint reluctantly incorporates him into the crew, and Silver begins his gradual transformation from opportunistic outsider to central political actor. At the same time, Eleanor commits herself and Nassau’s resources to Flint’s plan, despite resistance from her father and from others who regard the venture as too dangerous. Flint secures guns and a consort ship through a series of unstable arrangements, but the expedition is marked by mistrust within the crew. Young boatswain Billy Bones becomes increasingly troubled by Flint’s secrecy, especially after learning of Miranda Barlow, an English noblewoman connected to Flint’s past.

By the end of the first season, Flint’s plans have become increasingly destructive. He kills his close friend and quartermaster, Mr. Gates, when Gates threatens to prevent him from continuing the attack on the Urca for the safety of the crew. Silver helps conceal the truth of the murder at a moment when exposure would likely destroy Flint’s command. The season ends with the Walrus reaching the Urca de Lima, only to find the ship broken on the Florida coast and guarded by Spanish soldiers. What began as a promise of liberation through wealth is therefore immediately complicated by loss, betrayal, and the limits of Flint’s control over events.

The second season develops both the aftermath of the failed Urca expedition and Flint’s concealed history. At first, the gold remains inaccessible: Spanish soldiers stand between the pirates and the wreck, and Flint’s immediate priority is survival. As the season progresses, however, the situation changes. Scouts sent to watch the site discover that the Spanish force guarding the treasure has died of disease, leaving the gold effectively undefended. Silver intercepts this information and persuades the scouts to report that the treasure is gone, allowing him to divert the recovery of the gold away from Flint’s direct control. The retrieval is then organized through a secret arrangement involving Silver, Max, and Jack Rackham. 

Alongside this struggle over the treasure, season two reveals that Flint was once James McGraw, an officer in the British Navy. Through flashbacks, the series shows his relationship with Thomas Hamilton and his wife Miranda Hamilton, later known in Nassau as Miranda Barlow. Thomas had a visionary plan of pardoning pirates as a way of addressing piracy in Nassau, but he was destroyed by political betrayal in London when his affair with James was discovered by his father. James and Miranda were forced into exile, while Thomas was institutionalized and later presumed dead. Flint’s present campaign against Britain is therefore connected to the destruction of his former life.

In the present, the arrival of Abigail Ashe, daughter of the governor of Carolina, creates a possible route back to legitimacy for Nassau’s pirates. After the pirate Ned Low kidnaps the young woman, she is eventually transferred into Flint’s custody. Flint and Miranda decide to return Abigail to her father, Peter Ashe, hoping that Ashe, once connected to their London circle, might support a version of Thomas Hamilton’s earlier plan for Nassau. This hope fails. In Charles Town, Miranda realizes that Ashe had participated in the betrayal that ruined their lives by testifying against Thomas when he was accused of sodomy. The negotiations collapse; Miranda is killed, and Flint is arrested and put on trial for piracy. Vane, despite his rivalry with Flint, intervenes to rescue him. Flint and Vane escape after devastating Charles Town, and Flint kills Ashe. By the end of the season, Eleanor has been taken into custody by the Royal Navy, while Rackham has succeeded in bringing the Urca treasure back to Nassau. We are meant to understand it will later become the cache at the center of the plot of Treasure Island.

The third season begins after these events, with Nassau temporarily enriched by the treasure but also more exposed than before. Flint wages war against those who oppose piracy, while Silver, now more established within the crew as their new quartermaster, becomes increasingly important as a mediator of Flint’s authority. Rackham, Anne, and Max attempt to consolidate the gains made through the treasure, including efforts to restore Nassau’s fortifications. Vane remains central to the island’s resistance, while Edward Teach (known as Blackbeard) returns and complicates the balance of power among the pirates.

The major new force in the third season is Woodes Rogers, who arrives with a plan to bring Nassau under British control by offering pardons to pirates who would surrender. His program echoes Thomas Hamilton’s earlier proposal, though it is now implemented as an instrument of imperial authority rather than as Thomas’s imagined rehabilitation. Rogers recruits Eleanor, offering her a pardon in exchange for her knowledge of Nassau to assist his campaign. Benjamin Hornigold, originally one of the most influential pirate captains of New Providence Island, also aligns himself with Rogers and becomes a pirate hunter. Rogers’ plans are financially dependent on Spanish support, which requires the return of the Urca gold. This creates a problem because portions of the treasure have been dispersed, converted, or hidden, particularly through Rackham, Anne, and Max’s handling of the valuables.

As Rogers gains control of Nassau, Flint and the Walrus are driven into crisis. After surviving a storm and becoming stranded at sea, Flint, Silver, and the crew reach an island inhabited by a maroon community of escaped slaves and refugees. They are captured and brought before the Maroon Queen. Mr. Scott, formerly Eleanor Guthrie’s adviser, is revealed to be connected to this community: he is the Maroon Queen’s husband. With Silver’s help, Flint persuades the maroons that an alliance with the pirates could serve their common struggle against England. Madi, the daughter of the Maroon Queen and Mr. Scott, becomes a central figure in this alliance and in Silver’s personal story. The pirate-maroon alliance reframes the conflict over Nassau, expanding it beyond the ambitions of individual captains. 

The third season also marks the death of Charles Vane. Captured by Rogers’ regime, Vane is tried and executed in Nassau. His death becomes a rallying point against British rule, and Billy Bones begins to use the name “Long John Silver” as part of a campaign of intimidation and resistance. Flint, Silver, Rackham, Anne, Blackbeard, and the maroons prepare for renewed war. The season ends with the pirate and maroon forces resisting the British attack, Hornigold killed by Flint, and the Royal Navy forced to retreat. Nassau remains contested, but the conflict has become larger and more openly revolutionary.

The fourth season centers on the war for Nassau and the eventual collapse of Flint’s campaign. Flint, Silver, Madi, Rackham, Anne, Blackbeard, and their allies attempt to retake the island from Rogers and Eleanor, who are now married. Their initial assault fails when Rogers’ forces trap the pirate and maroon fleet in the harbor, causing severe losses. The survivors regroup on New Providence, and tensions develop within the alliance. Billy Bones, increasingly alienated from Flint and Silver, becomes a destabilizing force. Silver, now identified with the legend of Long John Silver, gains influence but is also pulled between his romantic commitment to Madi and the broader war of liberation against Empire Flint wants to continue waging.

The balance shifts when Rogers leaves Nassau seeking support, while Flint and Eleanor reach a temporary agreement. Rogers, however, turns to Spain for assistance. A Spanish fleet attacks Nassau, causing a massacre and forcing the pirates and their allies to flee. Eleanor dies during these events, and Rogers becomes increasingly driven by grief, anger, and the need to reassert control. Madi, initially believed dead by some, is revealed to be alive and has become Rogers’ prisoner. Billy informs Rogers of Madi’s importance to Silver, enabling Rogers to use her as leverage.

Rogers offers to exchange Madi for the hidden cache of Urca treasure. This demand divides Flint and Silver. Silver wants to secure Madi’s return, while Flint fears that surrendering the treasure will destroy the political possibility for which they have fought. Flint removes the chest and buries it on Skeleton Island, the place where the treasure is buried in Treasure Island. Silver, unable to accept Flint’s willingness to risk Madi, moves against him. Their conflict is not merely over the treasure itself, but over whether the war should continue at any cost.

At the same time, Rackham and Max pursue a different solution. In Philadelphia, they negotiate with Marion Guthrie, Eleanor’s grandmother, in an attempt to create a postwar settlement for Nassau. Max refuses a proposed marriage arrangement that would secure her position at the cost of her relationship with Anne, while Rackham continues to balance his desire for historical significance with the practical need to defeat Rogers. Rackham eventually sails to Skeleton Island, where Rogers has ambushed Flint and Silver’s crew. Rackham, Flint, and Silver then engage Rogers in a final battle. Rogers is defeated, loses his authority and resources, and is ultimately confined to debtors’ prison.

The series, on the surface, resolves Flint’s arc in exile rather than death. Silver puts into effect a plan to “unmake” Captain Flint, allowing him the possibility of becoming James McGraw again. The finale presents Flint as leaving the war behind, while the treasure remains buried on Skeleton Island. Silver returns to Madi, though their reunion is shadowed by the choices he has made and by Madi’s awareness of what has been lost. In Nassau, a new political arrangement is installed through the agreement involving Marion Guthrie. Max and Rackham remain influential behind the scenes, helping manage the restored order of the island. Rackham also remains connected to the unresolved treasure narrative, which points forward to the world of Treasure Island.

By its conclusion, Black Sails has moved from the pursuit of a single Spanish prize to a struggle over the meaning and future of Nassau. Its central narrative arcs follow Flint’s transformation from James McGraw into Captain Flint; Silver’s rise from self-interested survivor to the figure known as Long John Silver; Eleanor’s attempt to govern Nassau through trade, force, and eventually alliance with Rogers; Max’s movement from vulnerability within Nassau’s economy to political influence; and Rackham and Anne’s efforts to survive, profit, and secure their own names. The series ends with Nassau outwardly stabilized, Rogers defeated, Flint gone, Silver and Madi reunited but divided by the past, and the buried treasure left in place as the narrative bridge to Stevenson’s fiction.