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 Rediker, Markus.  Between the Devil and the Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Rediker’s interest in the transformation of labor history into working-class history is manifested in his interpretive analysis of seamen in early 18th century. His major unit of analysis is the cultural landscape of the boat or ship, or what he calls “the social zone between the man-made and natural dangers that governed the seamen’s life.” Rediker’s main concern in this work is the description of these seamen as the first group of wage laborers. Piracy emerged when these people had a chance to organize their lives differently than society defined it. Rediker’s work, in the context of cultural landscape analysis, paints a vivid account of the emergence of capitalism in the geographical world of boats, ships, taverns, brothels, alehouses etc. It is an excellent example for how a cultural landscape can serve as a methodological paradigm for writing historical discourse. [I. Cserno]