'Ignoble pirate motives generated ‘enlightened’ outcomes'

From Bootylicious - What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts? by Caleb Crain (The New Yorker):

Snelgrave spent a month in the company of the pirates, as they looted his vessel, and he was able to solve at least one puzzle. The night the ship was taken, his first mate, keen to join a pirate ship, had quietly countermanded his orders, even telling the crew, a quarter of whom defected after the surrender, that Snelgrave himself wanted to join the pirates. New mysteries unfolded with the opportunity to study pirate character at first hand. The pirates indulged themselves immoderately—literally washing the decks with claret and brandy—yet they declined to take luxury seriously; one called Snelgrave's gold watch “a pretty Foot-ball” and gave it a kick. They insisted that their true motive was not greed but justice. One pirate captain asserted that “their Reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants, and cruel Commanders of Ships.” Moreover, the pirate captains had almost no special privileges, and slept on deck like their men, not in beds. Pirate life seemed a medley of indulgence and strict equity, mockery and idealism, anarchy and discipline. Snelgrave regretted that his observations of them were “not so coherent as I could wish,” and could not decide what they added up to.

What if they added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism may have fallen like a lit match into the islands' population of paupers, heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill's suggestion, the historian Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe that pirate society “built a better world”—one with vigorous democracy, economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their contemporaries for “their casual brutality.” Before long, the contending voices of pirate studies had become a “cacophony,” according to one academic. Meanwhile, the idea that pirates are in some way dissident, rather than merely criminal, entered the mainstream. During the recent spate of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, one pirate told the Times, “We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas.”

A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates' leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate motives generated 'enlightened' outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be a subtle question.

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