[p2p-research] A history of pirates: The New Yorker

[Paul D. Fernhout]

From:
   "A history of pirates"
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/09/07/090907crbo_books_crain?printable=true
(may not be available in a couple of days, so look now if you are interested).
"""
The men who sailed with Morgan were known as buccaneers. They were French 
and English men who had gone native on Hispaniola, the island now occupied 
by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and on Tortuga, a tiny island to the 
north. Their name came from a wooden frame, called a boucan by the Carib 
Indians, on which they smoked wild boar and cattle. They were the ones who 
developed the first pirate code of ethics, the Custom of the Coast, at the 
core of which was an explicit agreement about the sharing of booty, power, 
and responsibility called a chasse partie. Before attacking Panama, for 
instance, the buccaneers stipulated that Morgan was to get a hundredth part 
of the loot, with the rest divided into shares for the more than two 
thousand men in the expedition: each captain under Morgan was to get eight 
shares, and each man one share. They also allocated set-asides for 
professionals (two hundred pesos for each surgeon, a hundred for each 
carpenter), incentive payments (fifty to anyone who captured a Spanish flag, 
five to anyone who threw a grenade into a fort), and compensations for 
injury (a hundred for a lost eye, fifteen hundred for two legs). Pirates 
usually further agreed to maroon pilferers, to give “good quarter” to any 
victim who asked, and to keep their weapons clean. Sometimes they went so 
far as to forbid gambling and onboard romance (“No Boy or Woman to be 
allowed amongst them,” one such contract read) and to restrict late-night 
drinking to the deck.
   Because criminal agreements have no legal force, it’s tempting to think 
of pirate articles as quaint—if not misguided, considering how often they 
showed up in court as evidence against their signatories. Leeson is at pains 
to show the articles as a rational choice, enabling pirates to create a 
voluntary association that was stable and orderly. By setting terms in 
advance, punishing embezzlement harshly, and keeping the pay gap between 
captain and men low, the articles reduced conflict over property claims. By 
limiting drinking and requiring clean weapons, they curbed individual 
behaviors that might otherwise have damaged the crew’s fighting ability. And 
by rewarding special achievements and providing health insurance they 
encouraged enthusiasm and risk-taking. The results were impressive. “As 
great robbers as they are to all besides,” a sea cook observed in 1709, they 
“are precisely just among themselves.” No one could join a pirate crew 
without swearing to the articles, which, Leeson explains, reduced what 
economists call the “external costs” of decision-making—in this case, the 
discontent of anyone who thought them unfair, a dangerous sentiment when 
betrayal meant hanging. Articles also made it harder for leaders to cheat, 
because their public nature enabled every pirate to tell if a rule had been 
broken. The only rules as tough and flexible, Leeson provocatively suggests, 
were the covenants that founded New England’s Puritan churches.
...
Friendships and working relationships linked pirate society across ships. 
Most captains knew one another personally, and many hunted together for a 
spell. Through their shared culture, they refined shipboard democracy. The 
supreme power aboard a pirate ship was the common council, which Marcus 
Rediker calls a “floating town meeting.” Whoever had sworn to the articles 
could vote. Captains were elected, and ate the same food as their men. Only 
when the ship was fighting or fleeing could a captain make decisions on his 
own, and he could be deposed if the crew thought him cowardly or his 
treatment of prisoners too cruel or too kind. In daily matters, his power 
was checked by that of another elected official, the quartermaster, who 
distributed food and booty and administered minor punishments.
   In Leeson’s opinion, there was a sound economic basis for all this 
democracy. Most businesses suffer from what economists call the 
“principal-agent problem”: the owner doesn’t work, and the workers, not 
being stakeholders, lack incentives; so a certain amount of surveillance and 
coercion is necessary to persuade Ishmael to hunt whales instead of spending 
all day in his hammock with Queequeg. Pirates, by contrast, having stolen 
the ships they sailed, were both principals and agents; they still needed a 
captain but, Leeson explains, “they didn’t require autocratic captains 
because there were no absentee owners to align the crew’s interests with.” 
The insight suggests more than Leeson seems to want it to—does inequity 
always entail political repression?—and late in the book he backtracks, 
cautioning that the pirate example “doesn’t mean democratic management makes 
sense for all firms,” only that management style should be adjusted to the 
underlying ownership structure. But a certain kind of reader is likely to 
ignore the hedging, and note that the pirates, two centuries before Lenin, 
had seized the means of production.
   Leeson’s analysis unriddles a number of Snelgrave’s mysteries. Merchant 
sailors quietly gave in to pirate attacks because of a principal-agent 
problem—it wasn’t their cargo—and because doing so enabled them to adopt a 
way of life that was a hundred to a thousand times more lucrative. Snelgrave 
may have been under the impression that pirates forced men to join, but this 
was for the most part a myth, devised for the sake of a legal defense if 
caught. Until their final, desperate days, pirates took few conscripts, 
because so many sailors begged to enlist and because conscripts had the 
unpleasant habit of absconding and testifying against pirates in court. As 
for the death-defying attitude—“a merry Life and a short one” was 
Bartholomew Roberts’s motto—pirates cultivated it to convince people that 
they had what economists call a high discount rate. If future punishments 
meant so little, their wildest threats were credible. ...
   Piracy seems to thrive when capitalism is advancing—when it has put 
enough wealth in motion to tempt criminals to kill for it but not yet enough 
for sailors to die in its defense—and perhaps, as in Somalia, when 
government is retreating. In several ways, Somalia’s contemporary pirates 
resemble those of three centuries ago. Violent and dangerous, they 
nonetheless are careful not to hurt coöperative hostages; they look to 
piracy to take them from poverty to a life of leisure; they have been known 
to regulate their own behavior with written rules; and they believe that 
their cause is just. The timing of their end, too, will probably be similar, 
coming whenever a major power decides that a crackdown costs less than the 
nuisance.
   Are pirates socialists or capitalists? Lately, it’s become hard to tell 
the categories apart. Toward the end of his book, Leeson suggests that 
pirate self-governance proves that companies can regulate themselves better 
than governments can, as if he sees the pirate ship as a prototype of the 
modern corporation, sailing through treacherously liberal waters. Such 
arguments haven’t aged well over the past year, but even in piracy’s golden 
age people were aware that an unregulated marketplace invites predators. 
During the South Sea Bubble of 1720, speculators claiming to be able to make 
wealth out of debt fleeced British investors and ruined many banks. Pirates 
who spent that year killing and plundering, Nathaniel Mist grumpily wrote, 
could salve their guilty consciences, if they had any: “Whatever Robberies 
they had committed, they might be pretty sure they were not the greatest 
Villains then living in the World.”
"""

I am not endorsing piracy of any sort, of course (it sounds like overall not 
a very happy way to live, to begin with, one hundred men stuck on a tiny 
ship). I'm just pointing to interesting historical aspects of their social 
forms sometimes, especially the democratic aspects found where they might 
seem unexpected.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/