This exciting scholarly work examines Dutch maritime violence in the seventeenth century. The young Dutch Republic enjoyed a cultural and economic preeminence, and many of its seamen also took up pillaging, terrorizing their victims on the high seas and on European waterways. A story almost entirely untold until now, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands presents new data and understandings of early modern piracy generally, and also sheds important new light on Dutch and European history as well, such as the history of national identity and state formation, and the history of crime and criminality.