Refuge and Hell Itself: How Two Pacific Islands Shaped the Buccaneer Presence from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century

Wim De Winter is a world and maritime historian specialised in histories of the Indian and Pacific Ocean. He obtained his Ph.D. at Ghent University (2021) with a dissertation on the Ostend Company’s social and cultural worlds in eighteenth-century China and Bengal. He has worked at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) directing the ‘Southern-Netherlandish Prize Papers’ project and is currently employed as post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven within the ERC AdG project TRANSPACIFIC, where he studies exchanges and informal agents involved in piracy, smuggling, and maritime knowledge transfer in the early modern transpacific world. His recent work is taking a more environmental and anthropological-historical approach. He teaches global history at KU Leuven, and historical anthropology at Ghent University.