After the rescue this month of Richard Phillips, a merchant ship captain who had been held for days by Somali pirates, US Navy Vice Admiral William Gortney was taken to task in a press briefing. The pirates, three of whom had just been killed by Navy snipers, “aren’t very violent towards crews”, a journalist insisted. “Very few people have died in the past.” This is misguided. If the pirates were truly non-violent, they would have no leverage for collecting ransom. But the desire to deck them out with an ethical system is strong. “Somali pirates had a code of conduct, although it sounds funny to people outside of Somalia to hear that,” one charity worker told The Christian Science Monitor. What is that code of conduct?
We might find out from Peter T. Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, who this week published a short book on the organisation of pirate ships in the early 18th century.* While the book bills itself as explaining the “hidden economics of pirates” – it even comes with a list of “management secrets” – it is more a study in primitive politics. Trapped in a floating community of criminals, the Atlantic and Caribbean pirates carried out experiments in democracy to rival our own, Prof Leeson writes. With no goal but self-preservation and the equitable distribution of “income”, they wrote constitutions (pirate “codes”) and established regulatory regimes (no smoking around the gunpowder), a social safety net (600 pieces of eight for a lost arm) and a separation of powers (quartermasters, not captains, exacted punishments and divvied up the booty).
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