Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two 18th-century pirates

The eighteenth century was, as any landlubber knows, the Golden Age of swashbuckling Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style piracy. Eighteenth-century pirates (as opposed to their unglamorous modern counterparts) have acquired their own roguish mystique. What is less commonly known is that women, too, had their place in eighteenth-century piracy. I remember, when I was small, being entranced by their stories in my Ladybird …

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‘Butcher Cumberland’ and the smashing of the Highland clans

Perhaps the most calamitous chapter in all Scottish history was opened when Charles Edward Stuart, more commonly referred to as 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', decided to invade Scotland in 1745 in hopes of regaining the British crown. Charles Stuart was either the 'Young Pretender' or the legitimate heir to the British throne, depending on whether one's sympathies lay with …

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Creole women in the British imagination

One consequence of the expansion of European colonialism in the 17th and 18th centuries was that many Europeans came into closer contact with African peoples as the slave trade boomed alongside the plantations of the West Indies and the American colonies. With European planters and their slaves living in close proximity, it was inevitable that …

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