What to read after Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger?

There have always been women among pirates and sea robbers. Metaphors of mysterious and destructive femininity may have perennially been assigned to the sea and its dangers, but the real women who sailed on ships - steered them, commanded them, sank with them, even commandeered them - have been ignored by a history written for and by men.

Ample evidence of women and even feminine piracy nonetheless abounds; beginning with ancient legends of Amazon sailors in several cultural traditions, and continuing uninterrupted through a wealth of confirmed historical figures, up to the present.

Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Rodger is an account of piracy through three millennia, in histories of women and men sailing on four seas: the Chinese Straits, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. Writing with passion and humour, but without romanticizing or ignoring the unsavoury side of some of their heroines, the authors turn history on its head. Nor do they forget the practical details, even including genuine recipes for shark and other delights.

Gabriel Kuhn's concluding essay on anarchism and piracy, "Life Under the Death's Head," creates a framework of understanding for pirate life based on its own conditions, rules, and body of thought. Pirates obeyed nothing and no one, they had no nation to defend, no leader, no God, no government, no state. Kuhn draws on Deleuze and Guattari and Stirner among other to describe a "breaking-out of structured obedience," an "escape from perpetual supervision," a "plunge into unpredictability, danger, everything that makes strong, free action."