ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book connects to James Boyle's definition of the late twentieth-century expansion of the scope and scale of intellectual property protections as 'the second enclosure movement'. It argues that property was not a natural 'thing' but an imaginary relationship based in the workings of the human mind and social life. The book addresses the essence of property, and discusses the importance of John Locke's property theory for the discursive construction of piracy. It focuses on the implications of a legal definition since the eighteenth century that casts maritime pirates as Lockean invaders to the state of nature. The book demonstrates how literary pirate narratives have contributed to both a theoretical and a popular understanding of piracy as adventurous, outlaw inconstancy on the one hand and as illegitimate and violent monstrosity on the other, and examines the colonial underpinnings of this bipolar conception.
