Johns has an abiding interest in “piracy,” broadly defined. This book, though opening with a violent death in a dispute between pirate radio entrepreneurs in 1966, is really about how intellectual history (featuring Coase and Hayek, who both spent time analyzing British radio in particular) becomes political history. Here, changes in British radio listening practices, aided by cheap transistor radios, changed the social meaning of listening and therefore of broadcasting, opening a path for commercial radio. Johns argues that the “moral philosophy of digital libertarianism,” though often associated primarily with 1960s American counterculture, also derives from the politics and history of British radio. The idea of offshore data havens, after all, comes from offshore radio pirates (and indeed physically overlaps—Seahaven was a pirate radio station before it was part of a grand, failed data haven scheme). Johns chronicles not just lawlessness, though the violence isn’t surprising, but also the deep entanglement with the law that these pirates always had—they created corporate structures and called the police because they wanted and even needed to live in a jurisdiction with a functioning government, even as they wanted to escape those constraints as it suited them. This is Johns’ least theory-intensive book, and it sits not quite comfortably between narrative and theory, but I enjoyed it. ( )