![]() ![]() Kert covers the many sides of War of 1812 privateers in four quick chapters that discuss such topics as privateer operations, financing, law and legal procedures, recruiting practices, and the experience of sailors. Although she maintains that the business side predominated-everyone from the lowliest ship’s boy to the loftiest merchant prince hoped to turn a profit-privateers also wanted to help win the war. ![]() Kert also emphasizes the secondary purpose of privateering: a weapon in a government’s quiver that harnessed private enterprise to public good. Few vessels brought in the fat prizes of legend and many men lost their lives sailing under a letter of marque. ![]() Privateering was nevertheless risky, Kert shows. Contrary to its wild-and-wooly image, privateering existed within a legal framework, extensive by the nineteenth century, that legitimized and regularized prize taking as a part of a merchant’s investments, a sailor or sea captain’s work, and a port’s industry. Kert describes privateering as fundamentally a business. The result is a work of painstaking scholarship that advances our understanding of the scope and scale of privateering in the United States’ second major war with Britain. As an antidote, Faye M. Kert, a veteran privateer scholar, offers her brief, broad overview of the War of 1812 privateering conducted from the United States and Britain’s colonies in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I have even heard it at a scholarly maritime history conference. The lazy definition of a privateer as a licensed pirate persists. ![]() Privateering was ubiquitous in the many Atlantic wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and yet because privateers were not as officially documented as naval vessels and have never been as alluring as pirates, they have languished in the literature alongside their better-known brothers in maritime prize making. Reviewed by David Head (Spring Hill College) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Johns Hopkins Books on the War of 1812 Series. Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812. ![]()
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