GERARD COHEN-VRIGNAUD Becoming Corsairs: Byron, British Property Rights and Orientalist Economics L ORD BYRON WAS FAMOUSLY ASSOCIATED WITH MARITIME PIRACY throughout his literary career, thanks to his dashing depictions of cor- sairs and their swashbuckling at sea. Stricken with the itch of wanderlust and "Proscribed at home, / And taunted to a wish to roam,"' many of his heroes sailed to and fro, living for stretches of time as pirates or suffering their depredations. Briefly mentioned in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), The Giaour (1813), Manfred (1817) and Beppo (1818), the subject of piracy appears at length for the first time in The Bride of Abydos (1813), in which the protagonist, Sehm, avenges an upbringing of humiliations at the hands of his pasha uncle by embarking on a campaign of high-seas terror. Cantos 2, 3 and 4 of Donjuán (1819-21) mark Byron's last full treatment of the is- sue, though the merciless pirate, Lambro, is less matinee idol than cruel vil- lain, tearing his daughter Haidée away from the lovelorn Juan. But it was the publication of the poet's most popular work. The Corsair (1814), that turned piracy into the emblem of Byronic heroism: readers were seduced by Conrad, an exile camped on a Mediterranean island who commands a renegade crew that attacks passing vessels. This passion for piracy in Byron's oeuvre begs the question of why the subject generated such interest in the author and in the audience that tumed The Corsair into one of the best-selling poetical works of the Ro- mantic period.2 The Byronic pirate clearly owes much to the popular tradi- tions of the medieval oudaw, the hero of peasant folklore and ballads who 1. Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos, in The Complete Poetical Works: Volume 3, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:321-22. Byron's poetry is cited by canto and line number. Subsequent citations to the Bride appear parenthetically in the text. 2. At 25,000 copies. The Corsair outsold the individual cantos of Ghilde Harold and Don Juan and was bested in sales only by three Walter Scott verse romances. See William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 216-18. SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 685