Mutiny! -Towards a review

I'm currently reading Kester Brewin's 'Mutiny' and I'm aiming to produce a proper review in due course. But while I read, I thought I'd make a few notes. Maybe in a handful of posts.

One of the things I like about this book, even before I started reading it, is that there is a certain degree of putting his money where his mouth is. In this case, he says;

my plan is to make back (some of) an estimated figure of what the book has cost me to write, and then release it into the public domain – probably with an option for a charitable donation. There’s no way a publisher would accept such a limited copyright, so self-publishing was the best way forward.

  Kester's aim more generally is about:

controlling the means of production, re-imagining ideas of copyright and being able to say exactly what I want to say. One of the final reasons I’ve wanted to experiment with this concerns the idea of TAZ – the Temporary Autonomous Zone

So, all in all, a good bunch of reasons to anticipate the book eagerly, and having read a couple of chapters so far, I'm already considering two or three people to buy it for.

So far in reading it, the scene has been set giving a sense of looking most closely at pirates of the 1700's but also other forms of piracy including books and publishing, radio, and looking at modern Somali piracy. Kester points out that he is not seeking to condone violence or robbery, but to understand it (I think that's fair). There have been tales of particular pirates and mention of a pirate utopia. One of the things that I think I've been most interested in is the digging back into particular matters to do with social, political and economic factors. 

What in particular I think is worth remembering when considering the piracy in the Caribbean in the 1700's is that the behaviour of the pirates towards other vessels was not noticeably distinctive to that of official naval vessels or privateers: the issue was not robbery or violence used; everyone was doing that. No, the issue was for whom? -Empire or the co-operative venture -for that was often what a pirate vessel was. Many pirates were, it would seem, seeking to escape pressed servitude and arbitrary violence at the hands of their officers. At least on a pirate vessel there might be a degree of democracy, a fairish share of the loot and considerably less risk of violence from ones officers (whom you might have had a hand in voting into office).

Of course, the question is whether Kester's characterising of democracy and fairness was characteristic of pirates as a whole or just the a few of the better ones. But, given, the kinds of conditions they appear to have been attempting to escape, it certainly seems plausible and even likely that it could have been frequent.

The other thing that so far has not been more fully explored, is to ask what the popularity of reading and watching works about pirates is about. Even in the industrial revolution in England the books on pirates were popular. The suggestion is that actually the recognition of a degree of sympathy for protest against brutally maintained monopoly enriching the few by virtually enslaving the many who never get a real sniff of the fruits of their labour...