A review by xkrow
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

4.0

 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.