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'When Bob Dylan sang, "To live outside thelaw you must be honest," he probably wasn't thinking ofseventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems toapply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violentcriminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popularimagination. As a 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 guaranteedcrew members a say in the ship's affairs. The surprising thing is that,even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson'swords, among "the most sophisticated and successful criminalorganizations in history."
'Leesonis fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state—and,therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authoritiesto insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules. Unlikethe Mafia, pirates were not bound by ethnic or family ties; crews wereas remarkably diverse as in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. Norwere they held together primarily by violence; while pirates didconscript some crew members, many volunteered. More strikingly, pirateships were governed by what amounted to simple constitutions that, in greater or lesser detail, laid out the rights and duties ofcrewmen, rules for the handling of disputes, and incentive andinsurance payments to insure that crewmen would act bravely in battle.(The rules that governed a ship that the buccaneer John Exquemelinsailed on, for instance, provided that six hundred pieces of eight would go (pdf) to a man who lost his right arm.) The Pirates' Code mentioned in the "Caribbean" series was not, in that sense, a myth,although in effect each ship had its own code.' (New Yorker article).
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