Historians of human rights would do well to clarify, or simply to recognize, which aspect of human rights they are writing about, since the field covers such a wide array of subjects. Samuel Moyn, for instance, is often read as making arguments about the language or content of human rights, when he has claimed only to be addressing the history of practices.1 Conversely, studies that trace human rights discourse back to antiquity mostly sidestep analyses of practices and tend to focus on far more general Continue reading → Continue reading →

Two important new books, histories of the early modern period, are starkly different in their topics, approaches, and conclusions. Yet they both intersect the topic of piracy in its heyday.