The burst of intense maritime robbery, roughly the 1650s to 1730, that swept the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. The entry treats piracy not as a world apart but as the violent shadow of empire — licensed in wartime, hunted in peace — and weighs the romantic pirate of fiction against the thinner, harder record.
A privateer and a pirate could be the same man on different days. In wartime a government handed a ship captain a letter of marque, a license to rob the enemy's shipping and keep a share. When the war ended, the license expired, but the men, the ships, and the skills did not. The same raiding that had been patriotic service became a hanging crime. The Golden Age of Piracy is what happened when empires built a machine for legal sea-robbery and then could not switch it off.