ABSTRACT
Through the ages and across discourses, pirates have been described as utterly mobile subjects: from political theory to historiography, from philosophy to literary writing. Both the geographic and socio-economic aspects of mobility are closely entwined in such writings, highlighting how piracy is entangled in the entrepreneurial colonial context of the early modern Atlantic. This chapter sets out to examine how these texts contributed to both a theoretical and a popular understanding of piracy as adventurous, outlaw inconstancy on the one hand and as illegitimate, violent monstrosity on the other. Further, it examines the economic underpinnings of this bipolar conception by drawing attention to their underlying conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate mobility. Like the pirate's maritime environment, mobility has been a central category, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, through which the figure of the pirate is negotiated and his/her (il)legitimacy debated in narrative discourse.
