Peter Leeson of West Virginia University looks at the ways pirates organized themselves: An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics ofPirate Organization. (working paper, June 19, 2007).
James Surowiecki based his July 9 New Yorker column on Leeson's paper: The Pirates’ Code, and on a new book by Colin Woodward, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down . (h/t Tyler Cowen).
From Leeson's abstract:
This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To e¤ectivelyorganize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.
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