Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes
Peter Lamborn WilsonPeter Lamborn Wilson focuses on the Corsair's most impressive accomplishment - the independent Pirate Republic of Salé in Morocco, in the 17th century. Corsairs, sufis, pederasts, "irresistible" Moorish women, slaves, adventurers, Irish rebels, heretical Jews, British spies, and radical working-class heroes, all populate a book which intends to entertain and to make a point about insurrectionary communities.
Peter Lamborn Wilson has written histories of Sufism, the "Assassins" and spiritual anarchism in colonial America, including Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights) and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (Autonomedia)
"One of those rare books which give historians new ideas to think about. It deals with 17th century European converts to Islam — usually but not always as pirates — whose numbers Wilson puts at thousands. His careful analysis of [the] renegadoes, their ideas, and political practice leads to a very tentative suggestion that some of them may have links with Rosicrucianism and the 18th-century Enlightenment; they may form an incipient cutlure of resistance by escapees from a civilization of economic and sexual misery. Historians will have to think about this books novel theme and pursue its implications. Wilson really does turn the world upside down!" — Christopher Hill, author, The World Turned Upside Down
"Peter Lamborn Wilson shows why we cherish pirates — and why, for the sake of the future, we must continue to do so. Interesting and compelling... A rollicking adventurous book." — Marcus Rediker author, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
"A chronicler, a historiographer, and a piratologist in the tradition of Defoe with immense learning and interesting sympathies... His scholarship cuts through the seas of ignorance and prejudice with grace and power." — Peter Linebaugh, author, The London Hanged