Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

by Steven Johnson

"Most confrontations, viewed from the wide angle of history, are minor disputes, sparks that quickly die out. But every now and then, someone strikes a match that lights up the whole planet."

Henry Every was the seventeenth century's most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular--and wildly inaccurate--reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every's most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event--the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew--and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It's the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.

Johnson uses the extraordinary story of Henry Every and his crimes to explore the emergence of the East India Company, the British Empire, and the modern global marketplace: a densely interconnected planet ruled by nations and corporations. How did this unlikely pirate and his notorious crime end up playing a key role in the birth of multinational capitalism? In the same mode as Johnson's classic historical thriller The Ghost Map, Enemy of All Mankind deftly traces the path from a single struck match to a global conflagration.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Pirates, True Crime, Biography, Audiobook, World History

Audible Audio

First published May 12, 2020

About the author

Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Come all you brave Boys, whose courage is bold,
Will you venture with me, I'll glut you with Gold?
Make haste unto Corona, a ship you will find,
That's called the Fancy, will pleasure your mind."

This is another example of a nonfiction book that is as compelling as any novel. Johnson's excellent account of the escapades of the pirate Henry Every between 1693-1696, and the impact which reverberated globally is truly astounding. Every led a very egalitarian mutiny of a British ship which he renamed The Fancy.

After attacking and looting an Indian ship containing extreme riches, the great trading powers of the world, including the East India Company, are alerted. Johnson speculates this global search for the perpetrators was the birth of international manhunts such as that which sparked the hunt for al qaeda. For reasons the author clearly details, this led to the extreme wealth and power of the E.I. Co. and the opportunity for the British colonization of India, a new genre of literature and media coverage of events and trials.(albeit at this time the"media" coverage was sung by balladmongers.) I think it may have also been the inception of routing for the underdog.

Steven Johnson does a fantastic job of bringing these events to life with detail and wit. In discussing the decline in British wool sales as Indian cotton gained popularity, he says," All across northern
England a defacto 'Make England's Wool Business Great Again' movement arose. Because it was the wealthier British women who were demanding cotton fabric, the government chastised them by calling them "Calico Madams". Johnson says, "Apparently, real women wore wool."

This is a book of adventure and history, the political and cultural events of that short period. The author presents a strong case for this group of pirates "lighting a match" that would impact the world for centuries.

"They were the vanguards of a new social order. And they were killers and rapists and thieves, enemies of all mankind."

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Johnson's Ghost Map for my global health course in university, and his writing shines again in his newest work!

In his author note, Johnson links this work with Ghost Map, noting how both follow a single thread to pull together seemingly disparate topics to show how a certain event can have global consequences, even spanning centuries after the event originally took place. That was one of my favorite aspects of reading Ghost Map, and I am so happy to say that Johnson has done it again! Enemy of All Mankind is a thrilling and expansive read, taking us from the dreary landscape of London, to Spain, Madagascar, India and the Bahamas, following the events catalyzed by Henry Every's raid on the Gunsway. After staging a mutiny aboard a merchant ship, Every leads a large group of pirates on a journey that ends with them getting away with the equivalent of around $20 million in today's currency of goods from a large, armed, merchant ship owned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. What might simply be viewed as an astounding heist is broken apart to reveal its effects on the expansion of the British colonial empire to India.

While Johnson writes a very exciting account of Every's exploits as a pirate, he does not shy away from the more unsavory details of his crimes. Johnson shines a light on the religious hate crimes, sexual assault and xenophobia committed by Every and his crew. He also gives attention to the Mughal women who were aboard the Gunsway when it was ransacked by Every's crew. These women were sexually assaulted in such harsh fashion that many of them committed suicide rather than bear witness, or be assaulted themselves. Johnson handles these crimes with sensitivity, and questions how the historical record has ignored the stories of these women and other minorities who were impacted by Every's crimes.

While there is little information available about what happened to these women (and the 90 slaves later purchased by Every after the heist), Johnson offers ideas as to what might have happened, backing up his conjecture with contextual historical evidence. This could easily get out of hand, with pages and pages of conjecture, but Johnson knows how to limit himself, and writes just enough to make us curious. Throughout this book, Johnson utilizes this structure to fill some of the holes left by history, and the understandably thin historical record on Every and the crimes he committed.

This is a really great work of historical non-fiction that should garner anyone's attention, regardless of whether they have any interest in pirates or not. It is thrilling, intriguing, infuriating, and enlightening all at once. I learned many interesting tidbits, and am super excited to shove this in the hands of anyone who shows ANY vague interest in this topic.

Thank you to Riverhead Books for kindle providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. Enemy of All Mankind will be published on May 12, 2020!

[Kist · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, love a good pirate story!

[Stacie C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and examines the factors leading up to his captaincy, the heist that would make him infamous, the interests of the East India Trading Company in the matter and England's attempt to make his crew an example, all for him to never be seen or heard from again. This is the story of Henry Every.


When I first began this book, I must admit that Henry Every is not a name I was at all familiar with. Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Jack Rackham and Blackbeard are some of the names that would immediately come to mind if asked about notorious pirates. So reading about this history of Every was enlightening, in many ways. This book sheds such a light on the historical events happening around Every, while managing to focus the story on the life of the pirate and how he was able to pull off the heist and gain notoriety. Every’s story can’t be told without mentioning the East India Trading company, the Mughal Dynasty, England’s response and the effect of the press. All of these elements have to be woven together to bring weight to Every, his disappearance and the age of piracy that would come after him.


I mentioned earlier how difficult it could be to completely submerge someone of the modern era, successfully into this historical era. In the hands of someone less talented than Johnson it may have been impossible, but he does a great job relaying this story. Told in a fashion that takes into consideration the scope of the changing times, the corruption at hand and the immensity of the oceans, Johnson takes all of the threads and creates a tapestry that is scary to imagine and frank in its descriptions. He doesn’t glamorize piracy, but lays out its true nature and the nature of those that benefited from it. In short, I thought this book was great and think that if you are at all interested in the history of piracy, then this is a book you'll want to read!

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging, breezy and readable history by an author who’s a bit of a magpie intellectual: the first third of the book is a trove of fun facts on many subjects connected to pirates, ranging across centuries of history, while the next two-thirds treat the activities of a particular shipload of pirates in the 1690s as a historical true-crime tale. Johnson pieces together their exploits (largely from later trial testimony) from the mutiny off the coast of Spain that originally gained them their ship, through the brutal sacking of a Mughal ship full of treasure and wealthy pilgrims in the Indian Ocean, to the show trials in England that led to five of the pirates being hanged. In between the book encompasses everything from the history of piracy to relations between Europeans and Mughals to the burgeoning mass media.

Fun and informative reading, then, and a book that digs into the contradictions of pirate life. Pirate ships were floating democracies, with constitutions that provided insurance for those injured in battle, and an extraordinary amount of equity in the distribution of spoils compared to both the aristocratic-dominated world of the time and the modern corporation: captains only got two or three times as much as crewmen, and often gave up their separate lodgings in exchange for greater speed on the water. Pirates weren’t always on killing rampages either, instead making strategic use of terror (conveniently amplified by the media, which used the sensationalism to boost sales) so that most of their prizes would surrender without a fight. This group conducted a surprisingly gentlemanly mutiny, in which the former captain and his supporters were allowed to row safely to shore. But they were brutal too, from torturing captured sailors for treasure locations, to gang raping women on captured ships, to dynamiting a mosque in Somalia after the townsfolk wouldn’t trade with them. Pirate crews could be quite diverse, but also traded in slaves, some of whom this group personally kidnapped on the Guinean coast.

One also has to note the hypocrisy of the British authorities here: the mutiny happened after an English-run shipping company left several shiploads of sailors stranded in Spain for months with no pay. Their wives filed a lawsuit, dismissed by the very same judges who later frantically demanded the death penalty after the sailors took matters into their own hands in a way that threatened England’s diplomatic relations and thus its trade with India. As is so often the case, physical violence is punished (in the few pirates dumb enough to get caught) while the root causes go unaddressed.

There were a few elements I’d have liked to see more of, like: how did the authorities manage to arrest any of these men for crimes committed on the other side of the world, in an era before photography or forensics? (On the other hand, much police work is low-tech today too, and the challenges would explain why only 8, out of the 40-odd who returned to the British Isles, out of the hundreds in the crew, were ever caught. We do see how they got one, when a hotel maid found his jacket suspiciously heavy due to all the coins sewn into it, leading to his arrest for theft.) And one I could’ve done with less of: there’s a lot of speculation about whether a Mughal princess might have joined the pirates willingly, when the stories about the pirates’ carrying off such a woman all seem to be thirdhand and mostly from commercial fiction of the time. If it had happened, wouldn’t it have made the official sources?

Some other assorted interesting facts:

- Stereotypical pirate speak (“Arrr!”) apparently comes from the West Country of England, an area that produced many mariners and pirates.

- Historical pirates include a 14th century French noblewoman who preyed on Channel ships for a decade in revenge for the execution of her husband—I definitely want to know more about this story!

- The reason India’s sea trade was carried out by Arabs and later Europeans may be that traditional Hinduism prohibited sea voyages. Anyone crossing the ocean lost their caste, until they engaged in three years of penance.

- At the same time Europeans were raiding West African coasts for slaves, North Africans (namely the Barbary pirates) occasionally raided English and Irish coasts and took slaves of their own. This was unsurprisingly a smaller operation (one estimate had 5000 British people currently enslaved in North Africa), and seems to have overlapped with kidnapping for ransom, as the British government redeemed some of them.

Anyway, this is a good read for those interested in history, particularly books that think outside the box and draw intriguing connections from different fields. It’s more cohesive than the last book I read from this author, and I would read another one!

[Andrew Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Interesting pop history. The manhunt of the title is just part of the scope. 17th century mercantilism, crime and punishment, sea warfare, colonialism, disease, and a lot of other fun topics are explored.

The extent that the pivotal event of the story is claimed to have altered the course of history is exaggerated, though not insignificant. Mr. Every’s personality still remains nearly as enigmatic as if I’d only read a few chapters about him, though his deeds are described in fine detail. The author lost me at times with too many what-if scenarios but he had to fill a book I guess. I’d recommend this to anyone who likes pirate stories with a nice dose of light history.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle may be true, but as is often the case, the content doesn't quite live up to the billing. The story is nominally about Henry Every, one of the major players of the piratical age. He's not frequently featured in modern works on piracy, probably because his career was a brief one. He and his crew pillaged only two ships, but one of them was a huge Indian ship crammed with wealth and women. They raped the women and stole the wealth. Every himself was never located, but a group of his crew were caught, tried in London and executed. That's it. Johnson drags the story out, and while it's interesting, I don't think it's enough to make a book. To me, the really interesting parts of the book (which make it worth a three star rating) were the ones in which he describes the growth of classic piracy, the pirate culture, and its effect on the popular mind at the time. Piracy has lost its luster now, but at the time it captured the public's imagination. One might say that for a time, pirates were the 17th century equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Johnson lets us know that this will not be a straightforward chronological story with a beginning, middle and ending, instead he writes that "you have to jump around in time to get the facts right."

"Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling but it doesn't always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are approximate, in the moment, some are echoes of distant shockwaves still reverberating a hundred or a thousand years later."

Johnson explores what it would have been like to be a sailor on board a ship in the 1600s. Regarding the sailors' sleeping quarters: "Imagine squeezing yourself into a typical one-bedroom apartment with a hundred other men with ceilings shorter than the height of an average adult male."

"As horrendous as the sleeping conditions were they paled in comparison to the food. If they ever build a library of literary disgust a special wing will no doubt be dedicated to sailors describing the atrocities that they were forced to consume at sea."

"With their cramped conditions and limited food supplies the ships were petri dishes for disease and malnourishment."

"Ships like the Charles the Second afforded the medical men aboard tightly controlled experiments. A hundred men sharing almost the exact same circumstances for long periods of time. It is no accident that what many consider to be the first controlled clinical trial in history took place on board one of these vessels."

Johnson also discusses the "strange reluctance in the literature of piracy to center the camera on these kinds of offenses [violence against women], strange because that literature is otherwise happy to feed you the gore and terror of the pirates life in such intimate detail [...] There are a thousand pages in the archives that will give you that experience uncensored."

"Gang rape gets on the other hand gets condensed down to a euphemism, 'then the men dishonored the women.'"

From the epilogue:

"In those first centuries of the Age of Exploration the ocean was a place that demanded constant experimentation."

"The pirates helped cultivate a mythos, the underclass that fights its way to a more just society that would be embraced by political progressives and revolutionaries endlessly over the centuries that followed."

"But, those pirates were also unquestionably a gang of xenophobic sexual predators. The pirates tortured other human beings for purely mercenary ends."

"They captured slaves and treated them as a kind of liquid currency instead of as human beings, they spent multiple days on a ship raping religious pilgrims."

"Life at sea is human culture at its most extreme in one sense, you are surrounded by things that pose existential threats to you thanks to your biology - water, thirst, starvation and yet our cultural ingenuity gives us the opportunity to survive in such a hostile environment, even make a living from it, but humans had to invent new tricks to pull off such an impressive feat. Some of those tricks were technological - better maps and compasses and clocks, but some of them were political - new ways of organizing a polity or distributing wealth ."

[Bon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, to the point I live-tweeted it lol. Tons of interesting facts, a variety of them, from the groundbreaking sociology of pirate ships (queer relationships, divided loot, insurance etc) to disease and politics. It's a pretty brief listen, too!

[Porter Broyles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book possibly deserves more than 3 stars, but it didn't grab me the way it I was hoping. It's well written and interesting.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the true story of the pirate Henry Every aka Henry Avery aka Benjamin Bridgeman, who led a mutiny in 1695, commandeered the British ship Charles II, renamed it the Fancy, and attacked a Grand Mughal treasure ship returning from Mecca to India. This attack resulted in a global hunt to find Avery and his crew. Steven Johnson has pieced together the small amount of historical information available on Avery. He also covers a variety of topics that provide the related historical context, including piracy in general, the emerging power of the British East India Company, and the vast number of legends and myths that arose afterward.

I found this a fascinating account of a lesser-known pirate who had a significant impact on both future pirates and merchant/trade practices. The narrative flows as an adventure and mystery, though the author does not sugarcoat the horrible crimes perpetrated by the mutineers. The primary source material includes an account of the trial of those eventually apprehended, which provides much of the source material. I had little knowledge of these events beforehand. I found it especially interesting that this pirate influenced the future actions of the British on the Indian subcontinent. Recommended to fans of seafaring history.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected a fun red and a huge does of historical thoughtfulness and thread-connecting and that's exactly what Johnson delivered. He used a shockingly violent English Pirate attack on a Mughal Indian treasure ship to weave together threads around the spread of Islam; the creation and self-sustaining logic of stock corporations; the ascendancy of European Imperialism; the breakdown of class systems and the beginnings of the ideals of individual liberty; the creation of celebrity journalism; and the continuing abuse of legal power by governments to promote their larger interests. Like all good history, Johnson not only told us what happened an what the evidence does or does not say, but he also tells us why it matters, what forces came together to create those conditions, and and how it influences us today.

*I was given an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Popular history. While the sources on the subject's life are sparse and contradictory, Johnson fills the gap with background and anecdotes.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is too much exaggeration and too many hypotheticals for my taste. This could be an interesting story, but not with the little hard information we seem to have available. Surprisingly, the fictionalized parts of the story, like Johnson's narration of the original mutiny, are not well written. Johnson tries to imitate a thriller, and it doesn't come off.

> Every's crimes on the Indian Ocean ultimately helped define and fortify institutions that would come to dominate the modern world. Thanks to Samuel Annesley's ingenuity, the Gunsway affair would give the East India Company new powers that would ultimately lead to their imperial rule over the subcontinent; the contretemps with Aurangzeb forced the British government to clarify its long-ambiguous legal attitude toward piracy in international waters. … Every's story also lit a different fuse: the deeply populist vision of a society where the stratifications of wealth and privilege could be replaced by a much more equitable form of social organization.

> In 1631, a Barbary pirate raid on the small Irish village of Baltimore in County Cork in the dead of night absconded with almost a hundred people, half of them children, all of whom were sold into slavery back in Algiers. Fourteen years later, two hundred forty English citizens living on the Cornish coast were captured and enslaved

> His father's terminal illness turned out not to be terminal at all. Shah Jahan lived for another eight years after his son clawed his way onto the Peacock Throne. That was eight years too many for Aurangzeb. He condemned his father to spend the rest of his life imprisoned in the Red Fort at Agra, with only a distant view of the Taj Mahal through his cell window

> A little more than half a century after the Spanish Expedition left London, sailors would stage one of the first general strikes in labor history. The word "strike" itself derives from their strategy of "striking," or lowering, the sails of anchored ships as a sign of their refusal to work

> Henry Every and his men adopted a simpler structure: two shares for Every, one share for everyone else. … Consider the opening line of the Roberts articles: "Every man shall have an equal vote in the affairs of moment." The pirates encoded these democratic principles into their constitutions almost a century before the American and French Revolutions.

> "Every man who shall become a cripple or lose a limb in the service shall have 800 pieces of eight from the common stock and for lesser hurts proportionately." Pirate communities built insurance into their constitution … All these elements combined—an onboard democracy, with separation of powers; equitable compensation plans; insurance policies in the event of catastrophic injuries—meant that a pirate ship in the late 1600s and early 1700s operated both outside the law of European nation-states and, in a real sense, ahead of those laws

> in order to maximize both agility in the water and manpower on board, most pirate captains disavowed their exclusive quarters and slept with the rest of the crew belowdecks. The egalitarian ethos of the pirate community extended to the architecture of the ship itself.

> Accused of crimes against humanity, accused of violating the property and the direct relations of the Grand Mughal of India, the six men were found by the jury of their peers to be innocent of all charges. Even Henry Every—"not taken" but charged with the crimes nonetheless—had been exonerated. … Instead of accusing them of robbing the Gunsway, what if the state centered its argument on the theft of the Charles II? The men had been acquitted of piracy, but the state could still charge them with mutiny.

> Aurangzeb would go on to outlive many of his descendants, dying in 1707 at the age of eighty-nine. In his final years, the Universe Conqueror sensed that the Mughal dynasty was on unstable ground. "After me, chaos," he is said to have predicted. It turned out to be an accurate forecast. For fifty years after his death, the Indian state was characterized by a "a string of weak emperors, wars of succession, and coups by noblemen." All the while, the East India Company consolidated its power over the region, culminating in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, after which the corporation assumed official control of the subcontinent, an administrative reign that would last for a hundred years.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this book anticipating a sort of dry and rote, but nonetheless detailed, account of the manhunt for Henry Avery. I was pleased to find myself not only enjoying the writing on every page, but not wanting the book to end at all. Johnson is careful to remind the reader that creating a history is an active process, — that at every turn there are decisions made which include or exclude parts of the story. He includes narratives that are important to the story which westerners often leave out, and also tries to outline the narratives that cannot be put in due to lack of historical record (like the stories of the Mughal women). He not only talks about what is in the historical texts, but how the texts were perceived, how they were invariably altered to favour certain viewpoints, even going so far as to mention how the architecture of the institutions of the courts and of pirate ships inform us of the ideologies of their inhabitants. This attention to detail at every turn kept the book fascinating. The non-linear structure of the causes and effects of history lead to a remarkably richer read than say, any biography would. I can't wait to read more of his work.

[Jenna Runge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly loved the flow of storytelling. As the story progressed it skips backwards in time as far as is needed to provide the necessary historical context. Also loved that it did not shy away from the truly horrible actions that were made while still acknowledging positives of pirate society

[X-Krow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegant and excellent was the pirate’s answer to the great Macedonian Alexander, who had taken him: the king asking him how he dare molest the seas so, he replied with a free spirit, “How dare thou molest the whole world? But because I do with a little ship only, I am called a thief: thou doing it with a great navy, art called an emperor.”

This is a book about Henry Every, the man who, in the late seventeenth century, undertook a mutiny aboard an English vessel, miraculously survived for multiple months, and later pulled off one of the most successful heists in history before vanishing from the annals of history without a trace. Simultaneously, it is a story about two empires – the British and the Mughal – and how the actions of that man potentially shaped the relationship between the two that ultimately led to the East India Company’s iron grip over the subcontinent of India for centuries. Johnson’s narrative pays equal respects to both these stories, weaving them within each other to expose the underlying cultural values that made Every the most famous man in the world for a time.

Britian’s dance with piracy is well documented. At its surface, it is a line of work that is to be abhorred – “Suffer pirates, and the commerce of the world must cease” spoke Henry Newton in 1696 – but many of the greatest pirates acted with the leave of Britian. Sir Francis Drake molested the people of the Americas under official capacity; Captain Kidd, before he took to piracy, was an employee of the East India Company. But Every forced them to confront the shadow pirates cast on the image of its empire. In dealing with this enemy, it opened up a channel that handed it power over the Indian Ocean and financially reinvigorated the almost collapsing E.I.C. It does not take too many leaps to acknowledge that in an alternate timeline, absent Every, India’s history and relationship with the British would have been massively different.

Johnson also finds time to discuss the position of women in the Mughal courts and the horrendous crimes committed against them aboard the Ganj-i-Sawai – the Mughal ship Every looted before retiring. Though committed against “foreigners” and “noble savages”, and called “ravishing” or “dishonoring” (labels that Johnson highlights sound “too mannered”), words should not be minced: “Every’s men were rapists of the worst order”, and the British public’s obsession with his escapades, as well as the various rumors that he married the Mughal princess aboard the ship, and the fact that these events were not even brought up in their eventual trial, betray more about the culture of the British at the time than anything close to the truth.

On the structural end, this book is wonderfully packaged. Each chapter is bite-sized, able to finished within ten minutes of less, making for the perfect “reading before bed” book. Furthermore, the writing style itself is great as well. Johnson has a small tendency towards dramatic flair, but that usually comes at appropriate moments, and the rest of the book is skillfully written to be easy to read and engaging to follow. It takes time when needed to break away from Every’s story to delve into the broader world at that time or explain some historical background, but the throughline of the second-mate turned pirate and its impact on England’s relationship with the Mughal empire remains its core.

Near the end, he writes,

Karl Marx once said of capitalism that you had to think of it simultaneously as the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to human society. To make sense of the pirates—and of Henry Every most of all—we have to adopt a similar split consciousness. They were heroes to the masses. They were the vanguard of a new, more equitable and democratic social order. And they were killers and rapists and thieves, enemies of all mankind.

And this is the same split consciousness I’ve begun to develop in my dive into the era of piracy that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At once, I admire them for their courage – groups that established codes of conduct more egalitarian than many democracies today, that stood up to their vicious and pompous masters and said no to empire. But at the same time, I see the cruelty they themselves partook in. Their comfort in the institute of slavery, the horrors that occurred on captured ships, the loyalty they still held to their mother nations. To see it as anything but is to do true disservice to history, and Johnson’s excellent book tows that line with utter brilliance.

[Yurious George · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOOOUHOOU!!! It took me several years to read this book. it has moved with me from one house, to my college dorm, and then to another house. And finally, I read it!

I'm absolutely not a nonfiction reader. I was very intimidated by this book, although small, trying to read something that wasn't fantasy fiction. Despite my fears, this was a great book! The narrative throughline in this book really works in it's favour, giving something for me to latch onto and evoke more interest/excitement when reading (said from the perspective of someone who doesn't reach for nonfiction books usually). The pace of the book was good, very digestible! The chapters were generally very short, making it easy to feel accomplished even though it was a slow read. Similarly, the chapters often hopped around different topics, usually alternating between what's going on with Henry Every, the East India Company, and the Mughal Empire. Johnson did a great job setting the stage for each event in this book, without making me read some boring 50 pages about how the East India Company became a thing in the Mughal Empire. I definitely did get a little bored with the pace at some point, with the ending feeling pretty anticlimactic: even when the stakes were the highest for the pirates, there wasn't such a feeling of pressure, really? The last few chapters certainly dragged on the longest for me.

I really like the attitude Johnson takes towards portraying the pirates: he does not ignore or gloss over the good parts of their lifestyle, such as the democratic nature of the ships, but he never shies away from condeming the atrocities they committed, and calling them what they are. He makes an apt criticism of how pirates' crimes are described, and I appreciate that he acknowledges and condemns the treatment of women in various contexts. Johnson lets the narrative be interesting, exciting, but does not glorify the pirates. Similarly, he doesn't just ignore the involvement of pirates in slave trade, which I rarely see acknowledged in fictional media centred on them. (Though in this particular narrative it would be difficult to skip that, I suppose). Anyways pirates are interesting, but not your cool morally grey heroes and I'm glad we see that in this book.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Steven Johnson's writing. The breadth of his knowledge and research always amazes me. He weaves in elements from science, economics as well as history and other disciplines to set the stage for his stories. I mean, admit it! You've always wondered how exactly a 17th-century ship's cannon fires. Um, haven't you?

In this book, he examines the deeds of a British pirate in the late 1600s, the years before what we typically think of as the glory days of pirates. Henry Every stole a ship anchored in a Spanish harbor (Johnson provides evidence that he had some justification for his action) and sets sail for the area between Africa and India. In this period, the Muslim Mughal Empire ruled the subcontinent.

In addition to trading ventures, the empire periodically sent ships up the Red Sea to provide transport for pilgrims to Mecca. These ships also carried much trade and treasures and were targets for pirates as they reentered the Arabian Sea through a choke point at the southern end of the Red Sea. Well, Every was ambitious. He took on the largest Mughal ship of them all even though it vastly outgunned him. Through a series of flukes, he succeeds in capturing the vessel. This is no cheery fantasy history of pirates. Bad things happened, including the rape of a number of women pilgrims.

Every escapes, heading back to England by way of the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the pressure is on the English to do something about their pirates if they want to remain in favor with the Mughal Empire. Johnson then argues that these military measures against pirates in and around India eventually led to Britain's running the whole show in India.

All in all, the pirate tale is an interesting story on its own, and the added dimension of worldwide consequences makes it even more intriguing.

[Joe M · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 swashbuckling staaarrrs! 

[Kimmie Meunier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book thinking “wow this pirate is pretty cool.” However, I ended this book thinking “wow this pirate isn’t very cool and also he’s not very nice.” This book was interesting and I learned a lot about privateering and how government sanctioned thievery and murder is a-ok 👍

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and straightforward work.

A lot of the book deals with the pirates’ culture, their economic impact, and their role in the history of the Atlantic world and the British empire. Johnson ably shows the conditions that allowed pirates like Every to thrive. He describes the connections between Every’s crew and the East India Company, how that entity made Every’s exploits possible, and how it used Every’s piracy to reset its relationship with the English and Mughal governments; the mughal accused England of being a “nation of pirates,” simply because Every was English. Every’s commandeering of that corporation’s property and his refusal to share his loot (about $60 million today) angered its rich stockholders and would trigger the hunt for him, but he got away with it. Still, he doesn’t romanticize Every or his crew, showing how they were the terrorists of their age. His analysis of the legal case against Every is pretty solid.

The narrative is fast-paced and very readable, but it has a lot of conjecture, and Johnson seems particularly interested in “what-if” questions. Sometimes Johnson goes off on tangents that are off-topic, if interesting. A lot of this feels like filler (no doubt because there isn’t much information about Every available to us), and some of it, Johnson admits, is speculation; we don’t even know Evey’s real name or ultimate fate, after all. Also, Johnson tries to make the case that Every’s piracy led to the British taking more direct control in India, but that seems like a stretch. The writing can also get a bit repetitive or long-winded.

Still, an engaging, well-researched and informative work.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

understanding that egalitarian ethos is essential to understanding why pirates like henry every were so popular at home. they were not just charismatic rogues, pursuing a life of adventure at sea. they were also advancing populist values that had almost no equivalent on the mainland.

steven johnson's newest book, enemy of all mankind, is the intriguing true tale of piracy, empire, and burgeoning capitalism — set at the end of the 17th century and traversing the entire globe. crime and commerce loom large in johnson's story of legendary pirate henry every. the ghost map author deftly portrays the era, as well as the resounding legacy these historical happenings had on the world.

to make sense of the pirates—and of henry every most of all—we have to adopt a similar split consciousness. they were heroes to the masses. they were the vanguard of a new, more equitable and democratic social order. and they were killers and rapists and thieves, enemies of all mankind.

3.5 stars

[Thaths · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of the book is interesting. But I cannot take it seriously when there are such blatant errors in the book. I loved 'Ghost Map'. But after reading this book, I am beginning to question what kind of shallow research the author used in writing that book.

If the author doesn't know or understand the difference between Babur and Akbar (repeatedly using the formers name to refer to the latter), or that India is in South Asia (not South East Asia), I wonder what else the author gets wrong in the areas I am not well versed in.

In short, this book was a good reminder for me of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how this book even got on my radar but I really enjoyed it. I guess I don't know very much about pirates (who does?!) so basically everything I read was news to me (lol). I also thought the structure of the book was really well done.

[Sullivan Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

"They were heroes to the masses. They were the vanguard of a new, more equitable and democratic social order. And they were killers and rapists and thieves, enemies of all mankind."

I have never read a better history based on a subject with so little information available. Yet, Johnson crafts an amazing book centered around the mythical seaman, Henry Every.

Enemy of All Mankind is a history of piracy, but also a global history of law, finance, corporations, mutiny, religion, print culture, and constitution writing. Johnson begins his history with the fateful meeting of The Gunsway and The Fancy on September 11, 1694. The Gunsway, a massive trade ship en route to Mecca for the Hajj, is overtaken by the fastest pirate ship in the Indian Ocean, The Fancy. Due to a cannon malfunction onboard The Gunsway and a perfectly aimed cannonball destroying her mast, the pirates win a decisive victory, walking away with roughly $20,000,000 in today’s USD, marking it as one of history’s most lucrative heists.

After establishing this account, Johnson takes a step back, exploring the evolution of piracy and how the age-old profession has always been feared and outlawed. His writing is refreshing in how he breaks up his story into branches of information, all connected to the global spark ignited by The Gunsway’s defeat at the hands of The Fancy.

Enemy of All Mankind’s protagonist—or, well, technically antagonist—is Henry Every, the notorious pirate, mutineer, and slave trader. Beginning his seafaring career in the Royal Navy, Every jumps from military service to private company work before finally becoming the world’s most wanted man. Johnson’s work seemingly does the impossible, as little is known about Every outside of his famed 1694 piracy. His origins in England are as mysterious as his ending; despite some of The Fancy’s crew meeting the gallows for their crimes, Henry vanished. Yet, Johnson uses Every’s impact to craft a history and argument that his life altered global commerce and politics and was the forerunner and inspiration for the Golden Age of Piracy.

Another interesting facet Johnson explores is the egalitarian lifestyle of piracy. Despite being international criminals to all (hence the "enemy of ALL mankind"), pirates lived a life of radical equality. As captain, Henry was allotted two shares of plunder, as were other high-ranking crew members, while the rest of the crew received one share each—making piracy far more lucrative than the barely livable pension sailors received from the Royal Navy. Not only were captains usually elected, but pirates drafted laws and regulations to establish equal pay among sailors. Despite their lack of formal education, pirates were able to draft radical laws, positioning them as forerunners of revolutionary thought.

Pirates have a romanticized history, as Johnson explains. Due largely to their Robin Hood-esque adventures, many of their bloody misdeeds were turned into ballads, allowing the English common folk to champion the outlaws. However, the adventure of piracy can often overshadow their atrocities, as is plainly seen in the forgotten horrors committed onboard The Gunsway. Carrying ivory, gold, silver, spices, and silks, The Gunsway was a lucrative prize the moment it surrendered. Sadly, also onboard were women traveling to Mecca—what ensued was intense sexual violence at the hands of The Fancy’s crew. This crime ignited global outrage, particularly from the Mughal Empire, which saw the violation of the female pilgrims as an insult to their empire. Yet, the Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb—known by his subjects as the Conqueror of the Universe—cared more about the insult to himself and his faith than the suffering of the women. The victims were part of Aurangzeb’s harem, and although they lived in lavish splendor and were allowed to practice their faith, they had no personal liberties. There is a popular fictional telling of Henry Every finding the emperor’s grandaughter onboard and falling in love, but much like everything about Every’s existence, this is just another glorified rumor. Johnson’s writing about the brutality committed against the women shows his intellectual ability to connect multiple global events in one history.

Yes, Enemy of All Mankind is a story of Henry Every—but so much more is explored and studied through the lens of his actions. In the end, Johnson presents a well-argued global history of piracy, allowing the reader to understand why English law identified them as Hostis Humani Generis—the enemy of all mankind.

[April · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book tells the truly fascinating story of Henry Every and his piratical exploits- which also weaves in with the saga of The East India Trading Company's rise to power as a naval force and governing body. A single pirate raid, undertaken at a perfect convergence of a fraught political climate between trading nations and multiple twists of fortune, has significant historical effects on the development of multiple countries. It's a tale of ambition, greed, religious zeal, democratic ideals, corruption, and the art of spin.

It's just a shame that the presentation was infuriating.

The author was clearly well-researched in the subject, especially given that few facts were left in the historical record. The attention given to The East India Trading Company, England, the Indian subcontinent, and others preceding, during, and following the events of 1694-1696 also form a much more complete picture of the long-reaching effects of Every's piracy and help to explain how one ship tangibly impacted history. But Johnson was also prone to embellish events with sensational details he even admitted were unlikely and frequently fell into conjecture. He also continually applied modern morals to 17th century people!

The small chapters were easily digestible and each had a clear subject, but seemed to exist as stand-alone entries in a magazine series intended to be read slowly over a period of weeks or years. Chapters will cover background, touch on the events of interest, and then leap ahead. They also simultaneously expect the reader to remember the names and importance of multiple figures from multiple countries with important motivations and ties to this period, but will endlessly go over some of the same details (with the same wording!) as if the previous chapter had to be returned, sorted, stamped, reviewed, and then filed by an inefficient mail-order library before a new chapter could be sent to the reader. In the acknowledgments, the author states his editor basically did a crime-scene staging to figure out what order the chapters could be presented in--something that I feel strongly explains the disjointed nature of the book. It truly feels as if each chapter was written with the intent to be a self-contained minisode and get shuffled into some semblance of order at a later date. I honestly think I would have enjoyed it more as a series of History Channel segments.

If you're curious and I haven't made it clear, I was absolutely not a fan of the resulting chapter structure. The first half (!) of the book constantly teases about what was so special about Every and/or the events of 1695, sometimes acting like the general reader should already be aware, before then returning to chapters of historical background. We regularly leap from pirate trial to background to hints to trial to background. By the time we get the chapters actually detailing piracy, I was annoyed by the whole book. Perhaps I prefer a much more linear narrative than the author, but I would have much rather had the whole trial at either the beginning or end of the chapter structure instead of being spread through both.


Tldr; absolutely fascinating history, I just despised reading about it

[Hunter C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book, I loved the writing style and how the first few chapters were spent jumping from moments or details in history that initially seemed unrelated or to large to be directly relevant to the scope of the main story, but as the book progressed they were all tied together very well.

There’s a comparison made in the book to an hourglass, where all these grains of sand become forced through a narrow gap and then expand again, and I think it’s a perfect description for the author bringing all these grains of information and historical context and putting them together for one short moment, with the consequences of the raid of the Ganj-i-Sawai expanding far beyond what you’d think a crew of bold pirates attacking a ship would ever be able to affect.

Excellently done, I recommend this book and I am very interested in reading more of what this author has written so far, and looking forward to any future books by him as well.

[Sean O · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scourge of Piracy on the Red Sea puts the East India Company at risk with the ruler of India (the richest man in the world.) So in order to protect their lucrative trading contracts of calico and cotton fabric, the United Kingdom wages an international manhunt to capture the most famous pirate of the era.

Pirate culture was pretty egalitarian, but it was also brutal. On one hand, you would make a fortune in a very short period of time. On the other hand, the life of a pirate was nasty, brutish, and dangerous.

This was a good book, and really dovetails into "The Republic of Pirates" and novels like Captain Blood.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author goes absolutely off the rails about certain topics. I understand wanting to set up "context" and "background," but do I really need to understand the Pheonicans and Sea Peoples to understand a piracy event that takes place in the 1690s?

This story seems to be about 200 pages too long. A historical article in a magazine would have been more appropriate as the actual event this book takes place around is truly discussed for under half the book.

I feel like the author is someone who really enjoys hearing themselves talk.