Examining the Past: A History Podcast

This episode examines piracy during the golden age from an economic history perspective, highlighting how it disrupted trade, reflected political and economic rivalries, and posed legal and jurisdictional challenges. Piracy imposed both immediate and long-term costs by destroying ships, cargo, and labor, increasing protection expenses, reducing trade, and discouraging investment, while sometimes p...

This episode shows that while seafaring was overwhelmingly male, determined women—ranging from disguised sailors to leaders like Grace O’Malley—could sometimes break into this world and exercise real power. Women rarely appeared in piracy, but Anne Bonny and Mary Read became famous by disguising themselves as men and actively fighting alongside Calico Jack Rackam during the final years of the Gold...

This episode covers the period after the buccaneer era ended in 1697. Piracy resurged briefly in the early 18th century due to wars like the War of the Spanish Succession, which turned many sailors into privateers and then unemployed seamen who became pirates. Famous figures such as Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts thrived during this final pirate cycle, but growing threats to trade pushed Brita...

This episode covers how the War of the Spanish Succession briefly allowed former buccaneers to return as privateers, but its end unleashed a short, intense final pirate cycle featuring figures like Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, and Bartholomew Roberts before coordinated naval suppression ended early modern piracy. Transitional figures Henry Avery and William Kidd showed how Europe—especially England—shi...

This episode covers the period after the South Sea raids. Traditional buccaneering declined as European powers increasingly sought to suppress piracy, though wars repeatedly delayed enforcement and allowed piracy to persist in new forms. In the late 17th century, shifting bases in places like the Bahamas, French Hispaniola, and British North America sustained multinational pirate activity, culmina...

This episode covers the second pirate cycle in the South Sea (1680s–1690s), which saw increasingly large, multinational buccaneer groups exploiting weak Spanish naval defenses, decentralized authority, and abundant offshore hideouts, culminating in major raids such as the sack of Guayaquil in 1687. Although Spanish militias and merchant-funded defenses improved locally, coordination failures, corr...

This episode covers the draw of the South Seas for the Buccaneers. Despite geographic barriers, Caribbean buccaneering spread into the Pacific as European powers began cracking down on pirates they had once encouraged, pushing some to seek new hunting grounds like the South Sea. A minor English expedition under John Narborough (1669–70) revealed Spanish vulnerabilities and produced the bizarre cas...

This episode covers the rise of mercantilism in Europe, fueled by the colonization of the Americas and the development of the sugar and slave economies, emphasized national wealth, state involvement in trade, a favorable balance of trade, and the strategic use of colonies, shaping European economic and political power from the 1600s onward. Simultaneously, piracy flourished in the Caribbean and be...

This episode covers the rise of Henry Morgan within the buccaneer world, showing how Jamaican governors like Thomas Modyford alternated between suppressing and encouraging piracy as European wars and colonial rivalries shifted. Morgan’s major raids—especially Portobelo (1668) and Panama (1671)—were militarily daring and devastating to Spain, but they occurred just as England and Spain agreed to th...

Spring Break Pause

This episode covers the Seventeenth-century Caribbean buccaneers, who emerged from a mix of runaway servants, marooned sailors, and marginal colonists who initially lived as hunters on Hispaniola and Tortuga before turning to piracy, taking advantage of Spain’s weakening imperial power. Bases like Tortuga and Port Royal provided safe havens where multinational crews operated with loose official su...

This episode traces Dutch attempts from the late 16th to mid-17th centuries to intrude into the Spanish Pacific, driven primarily by the desire for Asian trade, silver, and strategic pressure on Spain rather than simple piracy. Early expeditions by Mahu, van Noort, Spielbergen, and later the Nassau fleet faced extreme hardships, internal conflict, strong Spanish resistance, and logistical failures...

This episode covers the idea of  hostis humani generis  (“enemy of all mankind”) and how it was applied to pirates. Pirates operating under the black flag were treated as outlaws beyond normal legal protections, setting up piracy as both a legal category and a justification for extreme punishment and international cooperation against pirates. It also covers pirate warfare and tactics.

This episode explains how the Dutch “Sea Beggars” emerged from the Dutch revolt against Spain and Portugal, using privateering and trade-backed warfare to challenge Iberian control of the seas and colonies during the Eighty Years’ War. Driven by Calvinist thrift, efficient shipping, and powerful trading companies like the VOC and West India Company, the Dutch expanded aggressively through contraba...

This episode covers what happens after the disaster at San Juan de Ulúa. English activity in the Americas shifted first to outright piracy and then, after 1585, to state-sanctioned privateering, with Francis Drake emerging as the most famous figure through alliances with French corsairs, maroons, and indigenous groups against Spanish power. Drake’s raids in the Caribbean and Pacific—including his...

this episode covers England’s break with Catholicism, which helped produce the Elizabethan “sea dogs,” merchants-turned-smugglers like John Hawkins and Francis Drake who moved from contraband slave trading to piracy and then privateering as they violently challenged Spanish and Portuguese monopolies in the Atlantic world. Hawkins’s slave-trading voyages of the 1560s relied on coercion and armed fo...

This episode covers the development of the African slave trade and traces its role in the colonization of the Americas. Because the slave trade was so profitable as an economic activity, pirates were drawn to slave ships, sometimes becoming slave traders and other times becoming the givers of freedom.

As I have noted before, this podcast is an expansion of my courses. I am currently teaching this class in Spring of 2026. I started the podcast early to let student get ahead on the materials, but now need to take a pause so they can focus on their work assignments. We will be back on Feb. 17, 2026.

This episode covers how in the early 18th century, pirate ships faced constant dangers from storms, shipwrecks, and limited navigational tools, as seen in the wrecks of Sam Bellamy’s  Whydah  and other pirates like Charles Vane and Edward Low. Mariners relied on dead reckoning, local knowledge, captured charts, and instruments to navigate, but mistakes often led to shipwrecks or deadly encounters,...

This episode covers how Spain’s defense of its American colonies relied heavily on armed convoys, the Treasure Fleet system, and taxes on merchants, but limited funding and scattered settlements meant pirates and privateers often succeeded in raiding ships and towns. Over time, fortifications, naval patrols, and organized fleets were gradually implemented, yet Spain’s power declined due to competi...

This episode covers how Spain and Portugal emerged as leading Atlantic powers in the late 15th and 16th centuries, but their global empires quickly provoked widespread piracy and corsair activity, especially from North Africa and France, as other nations rejected the Treaty of Tordesillas and targeted Spanish treasure routes. In the Mediterranean, Barbary corsairs—most famously the Barbarossa brot...

The episode explains how Spain conquered the Aztec and Inca empires through a combination of internal indigenous weaknesses, strategic alliances, military advantages like steel weapons and horses, and devastating diseases such as smallpox. Figures like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro exploited existing political divisions, captured key rulers, and took over tribute and labor systems, leading t...

This episode covers the fact that Historians can reconstruct life in the Royal Navy and merchant service from rich archives, but knowledge of pirate life is fragmentary, drawn from trials, reports, and a few eyewitness accounts, which reveal that pirate ships were often disciplined, organized, and similar to merchant vessels, though generally less harsh and with larger crews. Pirate society differ...

This episode covers the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula, the Reconquista, and discusses how these events led to the Spanish discovery of the Americas.  

This episode explains how long-distance trade revived after the Black Death, shifting increasingly from overland routes to maritime networks centered on the Indian Ocean, China Seas, and key hubs like Melaka, while China and India drove Afro-Eurasian commerce through silk, porcelain, textiles, and spices in exchange for silver. It shows how the global demand for spices and silver, combined with Ot...