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A bestseller upon its publication in 1724, Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates shaped public perceptions of piracy with its portraits of such legendary figures as Blackbeard, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and Bartholomew Roberts. Yet despite influencing everything from Treasure Island to Peter Pan, Johnson’s book has yet to be taken seriously as a literary work in its own right.
 
This study explores how General History of the Pyrates was at the heart of early eighteenth-century British debates about commerce, colonialism, and law. Examining how pirates are depicted as both monsters and Great Men, Noel Chevalier untangles the contradictions within a Britain emerging as a colonial superpower, where ruthlessness and ambition were both feared and praised. Traveling the high seas to plunder treasure from foreign lands, pirates were not so different from the British capitalists who built fortunes from resource extraction, the plantation economy, and the transatlantic slave trade. Connecting the work to later books like Gulliver’s Travels and The Beggar’s Opera that satirized the era and its power-hungry prime minister Robert Walpole, Chevalier shows how the pirate became an iconic figure in 1720s Britain, a time of cold-hearted capitalism and rapacious colonial expansion.


 

The Michigan Model of World Production and Trade, developed in the 1970s by Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern, has become a valuable tool widely used in research on the economic effects of national and multilateral trade policies. Computational Analysis of Global Trading Arrangements presents the recent developments and enhancements of the Michigan Model together with the major results that it has provided in the last seven years. The book provides a detailed exposition of the model, and chapters describe its applications to a variety of important issues of trade policy in the United States, Japan, and other major industrialized and developing countries. It includes an analysis of negotiating options in the GATT (Uruguay) Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. The Michigan Model discussed here provides an empirical framework within which to analyze the twenty-nine producing sectors that make up each of the world's major industrialized and developing countries. Hence, it allows the authors to demonstrate the impact upon a given country—on top of the effects of its own trade policies—of the tariffs and nontariff barriers of foreign countries. The authors of Computational Analysis of Global Trading Arrangements have compiled a volume that underscores the importance of economic interdependence in the global trading system.

How is the global economy affected by increased militarization, inequality between nations and classes, environmental degradation, and U.S. economic decline? What are the current debates and issues? Can free enterprise and government deregulation solve global economic problems? As the world's attention is focused on the global economy, 25 activist economists address these and many other questions. Essays in Creating a New World Economy describe in accessible language such complex topics as the international debt, Keynesianism, trade policy, immigration, and drug trade. In addition to analyzing current topics and debates, contributors also offer alternative strategies on topics frequently neglected in traditional economics curricula. Essays explain development strategies and markets in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Japan. For students, activists, and general readers, this timely collection explains national and international economic dilemmas that will increasingly challenge us in the next century.