James Surowiecki writes in The New Yorker:
When Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination. As fascinating new paper (pdf) by Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and “The Republic of Pirates,” a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”
Leeson is fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state—and, therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authorities to insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules. Unlike the Mafia, pirates were not bound by ethnic or family ties; crews were as remarkably diverse as in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Nor were they held together primarily by violence; while pirates did conscript some crew members, many volunteered…
Read the whole thing.
2 responses so far ↓
Anarchy « The Everyday Economist // August 6, 2007 at 11:01 am |
[...] Peter Leeson discusses his work on anarcho-capitalism (previously discussed here) over at Cato [...]
fourcultures // December 17, 2008 at 7:23 am |
Peter Leeson’s workis indeed fascinating, and he’s turned his pirate paper into a ful length book with a great title. But you may like to take a look at a critique of his ‘rational choice’ argument at the FourCultures website. In brief, he assumes a single rationality measured in terms of ‘economic efficiency’. As it happens, pirates were not maximally economically efficient – the trading syndicates they predated were. So another explanation for pirate egalitarianism is required. One possibility is suggested by grid-group cultural theory, which posits four conflicting ‘rational’ worldviews, of which egalitarianism is one. In short, pirates believed in it.