Arrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

Natural History, May, 2008 by Brendan Borrell

Pirates may not come across as the most civic-minded folk, but a new study shows that pirate crews operating in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries adopted a democratic constitution and a sophisticated system of checks and balances before France, Spain, and the United States--possibly even before England's Bill of Rights was drawn up in 1689.

Peter T. Leeson, a professor of capitalism at George Mason University in Virginia who is currently studying the economic organization of pirate societies, says that becoming a pirate was a rational choice: merchant marines could make a mere fifteen to thirty pounds per year, whereas an individual pirate could net hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds in one successful attack. With such high stakes, pirates needed an effective system to keep their captains from becoming tyrants--an all too common phenomenon on the high seas. So crews adopted written constitutions that dictated how laws and leaders were chosen. Those systems typically operated on the basis of "one pirate, one vote." To keep the captain's power in check, crew members elected an independent quartermaster who had much of the authority that captains would hold in times of battle, while simultaneously looking out for the interests of the crew.

Today's pirates, who operate mostly off the coast of Africa and in the South China Sea, are not nearly as civil, because they spend little time together at sea and therefore do not require an elaborate system to govern their offshore criminal behavior. (Journal of Political Economy)

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