To introduce this special issue of Social Science History, my essay sketches the historiographical context out of which grew Joachim Radkau's (2008) book Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (German edition 2002 [2000]). It notes a few of the problems that Radkau and other historians face when undertaking a solo synthesis of research mainly at the local and regional levels. In addition to the issues of selecting themes, geographic extent, and temporal depth, questions of purpose have to be considered. Should global environmental history devote itself to producing a usable past for policies of the present and future? Should it, rather, take a prospective approach to reconstruct environmental thinking and practice as it was in a previous time, the better to identify unintended consequences and ambiguities in the historical past and to avoid presentism and anachronism while recognizing that history offers teachable moments? Radkau hews more to the second of these approaches than to the first, and his book provides the focus and a point of departure for the rest of the essays in the issue.

In his book Nature and Power Joachim Radkau seeks to provide a broad vision of environmental history that is not unduly influenced by American perspectives but does justice to the experience of the “Old World.” Given this motive behind his work, how does Radkau deal with the American hemisphere? Examination of the relevant sections of his book shows that Radkau is drawn toward areas of environmental history with scholarly debate, takes conventional positions for the most part on those debates, and follows the literature in emphasizing the United States over the rest of the Americas.

This article assesses the pirate bands in the coastal waters of late imperial China as political communities in flight from the state. James C. Scott's (2009) recent work on fugitive political communities in the highlands of Southeast Asia presents a novel and compelling account of small, remote groups living as escapees from the state. I expand on Scott's thesis by considering pirate bands as escape groups that not only escape state coercion but go on to accumulate sufficient power to reengage with and sometimes coerce the states they escaped. The pirate bands of the period formed relationships with the Chinese state that were by turns competitive, cooperative, coercive, and extractive. They were persistently loyal to no one but themselves. Two cases illustrate the argument: that of the pirate band of Zheng Zhilong and his son Zheng Chenggong and that of the pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao.