The book is dedicated to the history of piracy and corsairship in the 16th-18th centuries. It systematizes numerous (including previously unused) sources, memoirs of contemporaries, rare documents. This is not a strictly scientific study - rather, essays on the history of maritime robbery, written on the basis of documentary evidence and verified historical facts. The author identified the most characteristic and typical features of maritime robbery, systematized and classified it as a phenomenon of world history. The chronological framework of the book was the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries - the time of European penetration into the New World, the countries of the South Seas, Africa and the East Indies, the time of the formation of a single world economic market, the time of rampant maritime robbery, not yet limited by the strict maritime borders established by the colonial powers. .