Ebook: Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Moslem corsairs from the Barbary Coast ravaged European shipping and enslaved thousands of unlucky captives. During this same period, thousands more Europeans converted to Islam and joined the pirate holy war. Were these men (and women) the scum of the seas, apostates, traitors Renegadoes? Or did they abandon and betray Christendom as a praxis of social resistance?

Peter Lamborn Wilson focuses on the Corsairs 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 workingclass 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 os 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