Books published by Black Rose Books

There have always been women among pirates and sea robbers. Metaphors of mysterious and destructive femininity may have perennially been assigned to the sea and its dangers, but the real women who sailed on ships steered them, sank with them, commanded them, even commandeered them have been ignored by a history written by and for patriarchal men. Ample evidence of women pirates and even feminine piracy nonetheless abounds: beginning with ancient legends of Amazon sailors in several cultural traditions, and continuing uninterrupted through a wealth of confirmed historical figures, down to the present. Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger is an account of piracy through three millennia, in histories of women and men sailing on four seas: the Chinese Straits, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. Writing with passion and humour, but without romanticizing, or ignoring the unsavoury side of some of their heroines, the authors turn history on its head. Nor do they forget the practical details, even including genuine recipes for shark and other delights. The volume is introduced by Gabriel Kuhn's essay on anarchism and piracy, "Under the Death's Head." Considering the history of Caribbean piracy and drawing on Stirner and Foucault among others, Kuhn describes a breaking out of structured obedience, an escape from perpetual supervision, a plunge into unpredictability, danger, "everything that makes strong, free action."

In Mutual Aid, which was first published in 1903, the renowned geographer applies his explorations of Eastern Asia and his study of wild-animal behaviour to a critical examination of the theory of evolution. His arguments anticipate in a remarkable way the contention of contemporary ecologists that the world of nature is one of interdependence rather than strife. Born in 1942 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Czar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, Kropotkin had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and had attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could with with impunity to Lenin, "Vladimir Ilyich, your actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold." Kropotkin provides a potent argument for anarchism by showing that people tend to cooperate spontaneously and that the state destroys this natural inclination towards mutual aid by strangling initiative with the dead hand of regulation. With the exception of his memoirs, this is Kropotkin's best-known work, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It forms the cornerstone of his philosophy, and constitutes the most successful attempt by any writer to put anarchism on a scientific foundation. Mutual Aid is still the best refutation of the Darwinian thesis of survival of the fittest.