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The Pirates' Code
James Surowiecki writes:
...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 [Peter] Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”
There is more:
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. More strikingly, pirate ships were governed by what amounted to simple constitutions that, in greater or lesser detail, laid out the rights and duties of crewmen, rules for the handling of disputes, and incentive and insurance payments to insure that crewmen would act bravely in battle.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 9, 2007 at 11:32 PM in History | Permalink
Comments
Basically, none of the above os true for the Qawasim pirates of the Indian Ocean.
Posted by: bartman at Jul 10, 2007 1:13:34 AM
Also, from the little I read on the subject, this
Royal Navy and merchant captains guaranteed themselves full rations while their men went hungry, beat crew members at their whim, and treated dissent as mutinous.
applies more to late 18th, early 19th century (particularly with the pressure of the Napoleonic Wars on the Royal Navy) - it's the time period where all the horror stories, as well as most of the mutinies which they provoked, come from. During the 17th century Royal Navy sailors still had a lot of privileges and probably weren't as removed in their rights from the pirates that the article describes.
Posted by: notsneaky at Jul 10, 2007 3:06:49 AM
Makes me wonder if the founding fathers considered the governing of pirates ships into the Constitution of the U.S. They had to be familiar with the pirate code since they at most were only a generation or two removed from being pirates and scoundrels.
Posted by: Rob at Jul 10, 2007 8:45:21 AM
From the paper: "Everything taken -- money, jewels, precious stones and goods -- must be shared among them all, without any man enjoying a penny more than his fair share."
So communism really can work, among thieves. It provides no incentive to create wealth, but that's not a problem for pirates.
Posted by: Dave Coffin at Jul 10, 2007 10:39:10 AM
But it's not communism. Fair share is based on how much each pirate contributed and the incentive/reward system in place. It is not based merely on their existence, blind to their performance.
Posted by: Johnny Debacle at Jul 10, 2007 12:38:17 PM
Free market in ships? A bad Captain would find himself without a crew, and a lousy crewman would find himself without a crew to sail with, assuming his incompetence/cowardice didn't doom his ship. In the Royal Navy, there was no jumping ship, and they were so strapped for sailors that an incompetent couldn't really be fired (plus, he likely would rather quit).
Posted by: jb at Jul 10, 2007 12:55:36 PM
crews were as remarkably diverse as in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.
What, like with undead hands, Cephalopod captains and everything?
Posted by: Kieran at Jul 10, 2007 2:57:11 PM
Tyler,
Thank you for the link to a fascinating mangement read.
Much for any manager to think about.
John
Posted by: Shakespeare's Fool at Jul 10, 2007 5:01:49 PM
I guess it then makes sense that perhaps the world's most infamous pirates are those sourounding Somalia, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/19d8bcb0-2f07-11dc-b9b7-0000779fd2ac.html, being that many of them lived in a country without government or formal institutions, http://rru.worldbank.org/PublicPolicyJournal/Summary.aspx?id=280.
Posted by: pablo at Jul 10, 2007 10:28:29 PM
What I found fascinating was the equity of the shares. One one ship, the captain gets only twice what a deck hand gets. On the other, only a fifty per cent premium. This is entirely at odds with one of the ideas--that the captain of a pirate ship completely dominates and intimidates his crew. I seriously doubt, for instance, that the mob sees such an even division as a rule. Perhaps this was driven by the smallness of the group and the public nature of the division?
The other thing I found facinating is the apparent attention to minimizing ill-will in port. These were not the writings of live-for-the-moment predators.
"From each according to his abilities". One of the ways to make communism work is to have an enforcement mechanism at the input side of the equation. This can be purely social, or it can have...other implementations.
Posted by: Nathan Zook at Jul 11, 2007 8:47:38 AM
Free market in ships? A bad Captain would find himself without a crew, and a lousy crewman would find himself without a crew to sail with, assuming his incompetence/cowardice didn't doom his ship. In the Royal Navy, there was no jumping ship, and they were so strapped for sailors that an incompetent couldn't really be fired (plus, he likely would rather quit).
Again, from the little I've read, the 'no jumping ship' - in the sense that the crewmen did not have their choice of a captain - was not instituted until the Napoleonic Wars. Before that individual crewman could transfer between ships and captains when in port and this Tiebout-competition minimized abuses by the Captains and guaranteed the sailors some basic rights.
So the institutional transformation went something like this:
Napoleonic Wars --> Greater need for crews and guarantee of crews for all captains --> removal of the privilege of choosing one's own captain --> No competition between captains --> Rights of sailors get eroded and the ships start resembling the dictatorial/brutal ideas we have of them now. Also mutinies get more frequent.
But, again, this didn't really get underway until late, maybe mid, 1700's.
Posted by: notsneaky at Jul 11, 2007 2:56:48 PM
Free market in ships? A bad Captain would find himself without a crew, and a lousy crewman would find himself without a crew to sail with, assuming his incompetence/cowardice didn't doom his ship. In the Royal Navy, there was no jumping ship, and they were so strapped for sailors that an incompetent couldn't really be fired (plus, he likely would rather quit).
Again, from the little I've read, the 'no jumping ship' - in the sense that the crewmen did not have their choice of a captain - was not instituted until the Napoleonic Wars. Before that individual crewman could transfer between ships and captains when in port and this Tiebout-competition minimized abuses by the Captains and guaranteed the sailors some basic rights.
So the institutional transformation went something like this:
Napoleonic Wars --> Greater need for crews and guarantee of crews for all captains --> removal of the privilege of choosing one's own captain --> No competition between captains --> Rights of sailors get eroded and the ships start resembling the dictatorial/brutal ideas we have of them now. Also mutinies get more frequent.
But, again, this didn't really get underway until late, maybe mid, 1700's.
Posted by: notsneaky at Jul 11, 2007 4:52:24 PM
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