

 The Invisible Hook: the Hidden Economics of Pirates - TriinT
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8850.html

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sethg
IIUC pirates operated with a certain amount of tolerance from the government--
that is to say, from whichever government was unfriendly to the ships that
were being pillaged. Legally there was a distinction between a privateer and a
pirate, but in practice a lot of crews floated back and forth over the line,
shall we say.

A book modelling pirates as democratic capitalists _avant la lettre_ ought to
say something about the interactions between the internal government of the
ship and these external powers, but from the ToC and the review, I can't tell
if Leeson actually goes into this. Can any HN readers comment on the issue?

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johnnybgoode
This is from the book:

"Chapter 5 applies the economics of reputation building to pirates’ famous
fondness for torture. Pirate victims were understandably reluctant to reveal
booty to their attackers. Some victims even hid or destroyed their valuables.
Such behavior threatened to reduce pirates’ revenue. To prevent this, pirates
invested in reputations of barbarity and insanity, creating a fearsome “brand
name.” Brutally torturing resistors was one important way they did this. But
pirates used torture for other reasons too. One was to deter authorities from
harassing them. The other was to bring justice to predatory merchant ship
captains when government couldn’t or wouldn’t do so. In this last capacity,
pirate torture may have contributed to the provision of an important public
benefit for merchant sailors-the punishment of dishonest merchant captains,
which stood to reduce merchant captain abuse.

Chapter 6 considers the economics of pirate conscription. According to popular
depiction, pirates swelled their ranks by drafting innocent and unwilling
sailors from the vessels they overtook. This chapter shows that in many cases
the supposed “pirate press” was nothing more than a clever pirate ruse. In
response to eighteenth-century legal changes that made pirating riskier,
pirates pretended to conscript sailors to exploit a loophole in antipiracy
law. Like all good businessmen, pirates developed solutions, such as this one,
to advance their interests when rising costs threatened to cut against them."

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sethg
Yeah, but that's about relations between the pirates and the states whose
ships they _pillaged_. I'm wondering about the relations with the states whose
ships _weren't pillaged_ (as much).

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johnnybgoode
The author _appears_ to confuse a democratically-run government with a
democratic form of anarchy. Maybe this is for marketing reasons, because he
ought to know the difference between the two. In any case, the press reviews
completely fail to notice this, as you'd expect. It's important for us to
remember which of the two is being described here, because they are
diametrically opposed in many ways.

~~~
seertaak
He also appears to confuse a group of 15-20 men on a boat for a society.

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TriinT
Some reviews of this book:

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/everyone_in_favor_say_yargh/)

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/06/pir...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/06/pirates_leftist.html)

The book's author, Peter Leeson, wrote a paper which provides an interesting
overview of this topic:

 _"An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization"_

<http://www.peterleeson.com/An-arrgh-chy.pdf>

