In The Devil's Anarchy, Stephen Snelders examines rare 17th-century Dutch pirate histories to show the continuity of a shared pirate culture, embodied in its modes of organization, methods of distributing booty and resolving disputes, and tendencies for high living. Focussing on the careers of Claes Compaen, a cunning, charismatic renegado who claimed to have stolen more than 350 vessels, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who hit the seas at age 12 and became a buccaneer in the pirate jungle of Santo Domingo, Snelders paints a salty picture of the excesses, contradictions, and liberatory joys of pirate life.
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Stephen Snelders is a Dutch historian with a research focus on social transformation and resistance in the body as well as the mind. He is past editor of Pan Forum, a leading research journal of psychotropic studies.
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