Quedagh Meaning

Making War on the World

The state bounds politics: it constructs and enforces boundaries that separate what it controls from what lies outside its domain. However, states face a variety of threats that cross and challenge their geographical and conceptual boundaries. Transnational violent actors that transcend these boundaries also defy the state’s claims to political authority and legitimacy. Mark Shirk examines historical and contemporary state responses to transnational violence to develop a new account of the making of global orders. He considers a series of crises that plagued the state system in different eras: golden-age piracy in the eighteenth century, anarchist “propagandists of the deed” at the turn of the twentieth, and al-Qaeda in recent years. Shirk argues that states redraw conceptual boundaries, such as between “international” and “domestic,” to make sense of and defeat transnational threats. In response to forms of political violence that challenged boundaries, states developed creative responses that included new forms of control, surveillance, and rights. As a result, these responses gradually made and transformed the state and global order. Shirk draws on extensive archival research and interviews with policy makers and experts, and he explores the implications for understandings of state formation. Combining rich detail and theoretical insight, Making War on the World reveals the role of pirates, anarchists, and terrorists in shaping global order.

Captain Kidd's Lost Ship

The troubled chain of events involving Captain Kidd’s capture of the Quedagh Merchant and his eventual execution for piracy in 1701 are well known, but the exact location of the much sought-after ship remained a mystery for more than 300 years. In 2010, a team of underwater archaeologists confirmed that the sunken remains of the Quedgah Merchant had finally been found off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Kidd’s shipwreck reveals insights into life aboard a pirate ship, as well as the forces of world-scale economies in the seventeenth century. Using evidence from the site, Frederick Hanselmann deconstructs the tales of the nefarious captain, and what emerges is a true story of an adventurer and privateer contextualized by issues of economics, politics, empire, and individual ambition. The analysis takes in the site’s main features, wood samples from the hull, the hull’s construction, and mass spectrometry of sampled ballast stones. As Hanselmann unravels the mysteries surrounding the “Moorish” Quedagh Merchant, he finds linkages to world trade and the expansion of globalization in an extensive network connecting British, Indian, colonial American, and Armenian kings, emperors, lords, governors, merchants, sailors, and pirates. Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship also makes a powerful case for in situ preservation, demonstrating that the community-based management approach used for the Quedagh Merchant, encompassing both cultural and natural resources. Today, the site is accessible to the general public as a “Living Museum of the Sea” that preserves cannons, anchors, corals, and the history of one of the world’s most famous pirates.

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