"Epic, exciting, and highly recommended." — Midwest Book Review "A detailed, vivid, and often sobering history of life at sea." — Independent Book Review In the Wake of Empire, the Black Flag Was Born. Black Meridian: Piracy & Empire is a sweeping narrative history of how piracy and empire shaped and broke one another across four centuries of global conquest. From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the twilight of piracy in the industrial age, Sean Patrick Sayers traces the violent, intertwined struggle between crowns and criminals, merchants and mutineers, navies and the nomads of the sea. What begins as Europe's desperate scramble for trade routes becomes a worldwide fight for power, where the line between privateer and pirate turns thin, profitable, and lethal. Empires sanctioned sea raiders to weaken rivals and expand influence, then turned on the very outlaws they had unleashed. Along the way sail figures such as Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and Blackbeard, men who built fortunes and spread terror, sometimes for a crown, sometimes against it. But Black Meridian is more than a tale of plunder and gunpowder. It reveals how pirates became both the product and the provocation of imperial expansion. Their raids justified colonization. Their freedom threatened control. And when empires chose order over opportunity, pirates were hunted down not only for their crimes, but because the modern world demanded predictable trade and tighter borders. With vivid storytelling and a historian's eye for consequence, Black Meridian charts how piracy helped shape the map itself, from the Caribbean to the Barbary Coast, from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. This is pirate history as global history: a war without borders between the rulers of the world and those who refused to kneel.