Inaug.-diss.-Halle-Wittenberg. / Lebenslauf.

Inaug.-diss.-Halle-Wittenberg. / Lebenslauf.

During the so-called ‘golden age’ of piracy that occurred in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, several thousands of men and a handful of women sailed aboard pirate ships. The narrative, operational techniques, and economic repercussions of the waves of piracy that threatened maritime trade during the ‘golden age’ have fascinated researchers, and so too has the social history of the people involved. Traditionally, the historiography of the social history of pirates has portrayed them as democratic and highly egalitarian bandits, divided their spoil fairly amongst their number, offered compensation for comrades injured in battle, and appointed their own officers by popular vote. They have been presented in contrast to the legitimate societies of Europe and America, and as revolutionaries, eschewing the unfair and harsh practices prevalent in legitimate maritime employment. This study, however, argues that the ‘revolutionary’ model of ‘golden age’ pirates is not an accurate reflection of reality. By using the ‘articles’ or shipboard rules created by pirates, this thesis explores the questions of pirates’ hierarchy, economic practices, social control, and systems of justice, and contextualises the pirates’ society within legitimate society to show that pirates were not as egalitarian or democratic as they have been portrayed, and that virtually all of their social practices were based heavily on, or copied directly from, their experiences in legitimate society, on land and at sea. In doing so, this thesis argues that far from being social revolutionaries, pirates sought to improve their own status, within the pre-existing social framework of legitimate society.

The Ais were a Native American group who lived along the Atlantic shoreline of Florida south of Cape Canaveral. This coastal population’s position adjacent to a major shipping route afforded them numerous encounters with the Atlantic world that linked Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Through their exploitation of the goods and peoples from the European shipwrecks thrown ashore, coupled with their careful manipulation of other Atlantic contacts, the Ais polity established an influential domain in central east Florida during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pre-contact peoples of Florida’s east coast, including the ancestors of the Ais, practiced a maritime adaptation concentrated on the exploitation of their bountiful riverine, estuarine, and marine environments. The Ais then modified their maritime skills to cope with the opportunities and challenges that accompanied European contact. Using their existing aquatic abilities, they ably salvaged goods and castaways from the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch vessels dashed on the rocks and reefs of Florida’s coast. The Ais’ strategic redistribution of these materials and peoples to other Florida Native Americans, the Spaniards of St. Augustine, and other passing Europeans gained them greater influence. This process, which I call indigenous wrecking, enabled the Ais to expand their domain on the peninsula. Coastal Florida Native Americans’ maritime abilities also attracted the attention of Europeans. In the late seventeenth century, English buccaneers and salvagers raided Florida’s east coast to capture indigenous divers, whom they sent to work the wreck of a sunken Spanish treasure ship located in the Bahamas. The English subsequently sold the surviving Native American captives to other Caribbean slave markets. Despite population losses to such raids, the Ais and other peoples of the east coast thrived on Atlantic exchange and used their existing maritime adaptation to resist colonial intrusions until the start of the eighteenth century. This dissertation thus offers a narrative about Native Americans and the Atlantic that is unlike most Southeastern Indian stories. The Ais used their maritime adaptation and the process of indigenous wrecking to engage and exploit the arriving Atlantic world. In the contact era, the Ais truly became Atlantic Ais.

This thesis argues that Edith Wharton’s assessment of American ways and their meaning in her post-war fiction has been widely misread. Its title derives from French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), which she wrote to educate her countrymen about French culture and society. Making sense of America was as great a challenge to Wharton. Much of her later fiction was for a long time dismissed by critics on the grounds that she had failed to ‘make sense’ of America. Wharton was troubled by American materialism and optimism, yet she believed in a culturally significant future for her nation. She advocated – and wrote – an American fiction that looked critically at society and acknowledged the nation’s ties to Europe. Sometimes her assessment of American ways is reductive, and presented in a tone that her critics, then and since, found off- putting and snobbish. But her skepticism about American modernity was penetrating and prophetic, and has not been given its due. In criticism over the last two decades, a case for the place of Wharton’s post-war fiction in canons of feminism and modernism has been persuasively made. The thesis responds to these positions, but makes its own argument that the post-war writing reflects broader shift in American identity and ideology. The thesis is broadly historicist in its strategy, opening with a discussionofthereputationofthesetextsandthatoftheauthormoregenerally. Afterthat entry-point, it is organized thematically, with four chapters covering topics that are seen as key components of American ideology in Wharton’s post-war writing. These include modernity, gender equality, the American Dream of social mobility, and American exceptionalism. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Wharton’s prognostications in the context of twenty-first century America.