The figure of the pirate as we know him can be attributed almost entirely to A General History of the Pyrates, written by someone calling himself Captain Charles Johnson and published in two volumes in 1724 and 1728 respectively. Late eighteenth-century accounts of the pirate, in newspapers and fiction alike, echo or duplicate outright this widely published text, and it is from A General History that we get our mostly factual accounts of Blackbeard, Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts, Captains Avery and Kidd, and the famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. David Cordingly writes baldly that ‘Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates’.

This modern conception of pirates is easy to romanticise, and indeed much contemporary criticism celebrates the radicalism of pirate communities, but it is possible to consider the effects of pirates’ ostracisation without idealising their intentions. Eighteenth-century pirates were not on a mission to revolutionise spatial conception, to be sure; their mission was to survive in extraordinarily dire circumstances. But their legal status as hostis humani generis, the common enemy of mankind, led them to establish new social structures in response to their exclusion from national identities. If pirates can be thought of as citizens at all, theirs is a citizenship that is non-territorial, or else theirs is a territory that is non-national. Either way, the legal status of pirates had radicalising effects, and it is that radicalism, in part, that led not only to Europe's war against Atlantic piracy, but also to the romanticisation of piracy in the decades (and centuries) to come.