Introduction: meanings and mass executions -- Institutions as cultural systems -- The transformations of empire -- Vagueness and violence on the maritime periphery -- The classification of pirates -- Guns, gallows, and interpretive infrastructures -- "Hung up in irons, to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others" -- Ambiguity lost: temporality and fatalism on the edge of empire -- Conclusion: pirates, adverbs, and institutions.
