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Piratical Schemes and Contracts': Pirate Articles and their Society, 1660-1730
During the so-called ‘golden age’ of piracy that occurred in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, several thousands of men and a handful of women sailed aboard pirate ships. The narrative, operational techniques, and economic repercussions of the waves of piracy that threatened maritime trade during the ‘golden age’ have fascinated researchers, and so too has the social history of the people involved. Traditionally, the historiography of the social history of pirates has portrayed them as democratic and highly egalitarian bandits, divided their spoil fairly amongst their number, offered compensation for comrades injured in battle, and appointed their own officers by popular vote. They have been presented in contrast to the legitimate societies of Europe and America, and as revolutionaries, eschewing the unfair and harsh practices prevalent in legitimate maritime employment. This study, however, argues that the ‘revolutionary’ model of ‘golden age’ pirates is not an accurate reflection of reality. By using the ‘articles’ or shipboard rules created by pirates, this thesis explores the questions of pirates’ hierarchy, economic practices, social control, and systems of justice, and contextualises the pirates’ society within legitimate society to show that pirates were not as egalitarian or democratic as they have been portrayed, and that virtually all of their social practices were based heavily on, or copied directly from, their experiences in legitimate society, on land and at sea. In doing so, this thesis argues that far from being social revolutionaries, pirates sought to improve their own status, within the pre-existing social framework of legitimate society.
356 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 2013
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July 22, 2024
A fantastic thesis undermined by some occasional straw-manning and weird misinterpretations of its own data, as well as a heavy dose of under-theorisation. Nevertheless, despite these annoyances, this is still one of better pieces of pirate scholarship to come out of the Rediker-paradigm, and I'm annoyed that its ideas haven't been engaged with more frequently in the subsequent literature.
Pirate studies went through something of a civil war from the 1980s-2010s. It all started when B.R. Burg and Christopher Hill threw down a gauntlet inviting historians to study the social basis of piracy, to look beyond the romantic images of black flags and sadistic treasure hunters to see if there were any coherent political motivations at play, with this call being most forcefully answered by Marcus Rediker who dominated the subsequent wave of radical scholarship. There were dozens of strands to this, all asking various questions about how admirable or rebellious 18th century pirates were according to contemporary political values. Were pirates gay bandits sailing the seven seas in search of a good spot for sodomy? Were they some kind of anarchists? Were they proto-communists? Or as E.T. Fox himself once argued, were they actually Jacobite renegades, counter-cultural edgelords performatively pining for the return of the Stuarts and the rolling back of the 1688 Glorious Revolution?
Against these heady theories (of which there are far too many for me to list here) there then rose a school of more curmudgeonly historians. David Cordingly, Peter Earle, and, mostly vehemently of all, Arne Bialuschewski, all took turns trying to fact check the more radical arguments, presenting pirates instead as bloodthirsty monsters that only some sick fool or delusional ideologues would ever want to admire. To them the glorification of pirates in pop-culture and academia wasn't just historically inaccurate; it was morally deranged.
Of course the radicals hit back with their own arguments. Most of our sources on pirates were written by their enemies. Their violence was hardly exceptional when you look at what 'legitimate' governments did at the time. And whatever else, pirates did have democratic structures aboard their ships, something that could hardly be said of the land-based governments that the conservative historians implicitly or explicitly suggest should hold our admiration instead.
Most of this ended up turning into a highly unproductive mud-slinging match. It only really ended with the rise of the Maritime Historiographical approach in pirate studies, typified by Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, which cut through a lot of the controversy by widening the scope of what counted as 'pirate history', and linking the politics of piracy to land-based communities that deepened and complicated our understanding of these actors, turning them from free-wheeling adventurers of the oceans into opportunistic transnational agents cultivating loyalty with colonial allies, local economies, and corrupt governors. Whatever the politics at play in these exchanges, they're harder to neatly categorise into tidy libertarian formulas.
The Maritime paradigm has its own flaws, buts the timing of its arrival was unfortunate for this seldom-cited doctoral thesis that attempted to lay the radical Rediker-dominated paradigm to rest for good, only for it to arrive just as scholars were already moving onto something more novel anyway, which is the only reason I can think for why it doesn't come up more often.
Taking issue with some of the... more extravagant claims about how pirate democracies worked, Fox argued that pirate ships (a) had more rules and regulations than historians usually realise; (b) those radical features were often inspired by political/social structures from land societies anyway, rather than being invented out of thin air; and (c) pirates did not want to live forever on the oceans, but instead used piracy as a way to quickly gain the riches required to climb the social ladder.
Some of these points are strongly argued. One fascinating highlight is his casual revision of the narrative of Bonny and Read being disguised as men. Instead he points out that Woodes Rogers' declaration calling for their arrest for the theft of the William already lists them by name as women, meaning that even colonial governments knew their gender within (at most) 30 days of their first act of piracy, which suggests their crewmates likely knew as well. If this interpretation is accepted then this radically overturns most narratives of the pair, since it suggests that they were accepted as women from the beginning of their adventures, which has fascinating implications for how pirate crews first formed their composition and cultures.
What you get with Fox is therefore the most sustained example of anti-radical source criticism out there, and for the most part he does a fantastic job debunking the wilder claims. Unfortunately, he also has a habit of going too far with this. Some radical arguments really are quite silly, but Marcus Rediker is seldom so extreme as Fox's selective quotations make him sound, whilst Gabriel Kuhn is never mentioned, despite him having pruned the radical arguments into a much stronger and more nuanced position that Fox would have been better off treating as a steel-man to charge against. For one thing, Fox seems to operate under the misapprehension that pirate ships having rules and discipline means they couldn't be libertarian - which fundamentally misunderstands what most anarchist theorists believe about libertarian social structures in the first place.
Second, whilst his observations about how pirates were inspired by land-based institutions and political structures are mostly pretty good, I don't understand why that means pirates don't get credited for innovating on those structures or extending their logic in more radical ways, especially since he is willing to concede the concept of iterative innovation far more charitably to thinkers in other decades. One particularly clunky argument Fox makes is that:
Yes, Dr Fox. Political philosophers in the 1790s did have different political ideas to labouring seamen in the 1710s. "Others at different times" manages to displace both categories in its own comparison, making any evaluation under that rubric utterly meaningless. This sentence probably slots alongside "presencing that presences without presence and without presences" as one of the most galaxy-brained sentences I have ever found in a published academic text. Bravo.
Thirdly, I'm not sure I quite follow how Fox has used some of his data to reach his desired conclusions. During one section where he quite emphatically tries to prove that pirates did not innovate in their pay structures, instead copying them from legalised privateering practice, his data on Table 4 predominantly compares pirate pay rates to privateers from the 1740s onwards... twenty years after the Golden Age of piracy had ended. Considering David Starkey's argument that privateers copied pirate pay structures due to their effectiveness at motivating crews to commit to their work, it would seem that Fox's data actually supports Starkey's case... i.e. the complete opposite of Fox's own interpretation.
Finally, there's a faintly smug quality that one gets in a lot of anti-radical pirate history that at some point has to be addressed; namely, its implicit bragging that theirs is a strict, sober worldview, far apart from the ideologically driven claims of their opponents.
The purpose of political theory is that it helps codify a worldview, giving a structure within which one can organise empirical data and attempt to extrapolate a comprehensible answer from the complexity of real world chaos. Part of what history-from-below historiography does is take the limited data we have, hold it up to a satanic light, and see what might be suggested on the underside of the page that our ancestors chose to write on. Of course, history-from-below can become utterly bastardised by malpractice, magical thinking, and grotesque decontextualisation of selective quotes, and these faults blight radical pirate historiography at every level. Much as I love this school, I can't help feeling a healthy sense of glee whenever Bialuschewski or Fox upend some of the radical pretensions that are obscuring our understanding of history. I have no loyalty here; I love watching academics yanking the rug out from under each other, even when the answers disappoint the dearer cockles of my romantic heart.
Nevertheless, both Fox and Bialuschewski in particular have a habit of treating their lack of a theoretical framework as therefore somehow especially committed to to sober principles of archival scholarship in comparison to the more theoretically-informed approaches of their opponents. If a claim isn't supported by the the documents we find in the archives, they claim, we should disregard it from academic study.
But the things is... they actually do have a habit of making the same kind of extrapolations as the radicals do from their sources, inferring motives and speculating on connective details in the ways that their documentation does not explicitly support. The catch is that it's often difficult to spot when they're doing this because (a) they don't admit that they have a worldview, which the radicals at least have the good grace to do; (b) they probably don't realise they are doing this because they haven't explicitly committed to a theoretical framework (although from the way Fox approvingly cites The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates and echoes many of its formulations of pirate motivations, you can assume that he is strongly influenced by some form of Rational Choice Theory); and (c) the worldview/theories they have unconsciously committed to are cynical ones.
Put simply, if someone saw a video a woman shooting a man in the head before taking his money, most people's worldviews would probably make them credulous to a cynical interpretation of that behaviour. If some plucky interloper chirped up to say 'No, actually, the woman shooting the other guy in the head had a really idealistic motivation and probably went to go give that money to a dog orphanage, since the person she shot was a thief responsible for starving a million puppies' you will almost certainly disbelieve that interpretation in the absence of very strong evidence. But imagine that you then found out that the shooter in this story was later publicly tortured and executed by the victim's brother, who did so using a set of gallows made from fresh dog bones produced in his factory, 'Kennel Crusher Inc.' from which local legends for the next 6 centuries still said the surrounding hills were constantly echoing from the sound of howling animals. Oh, and the video had a watermark on it from 'Stagecraft necro-porium.com'.
Contextually, these details are pretty suggestive, but on their own they don't actually disprove any cynical interpretations of the woman's behaviour. Her victim could coincidentally be an evil bastard without making her a radical assassin raging against the puppy-necrofurniture industry. Nevertheless, if you applied a political theory that was structured around understanding political actions as informed and represented through certain matrixes of established power structures, then you might, on the whole, be willing to credit the more idealistic interpretation so long as you emphasised that you were interpreting this evidence through a particular theoretical framework. Of course you could then put another political theory onto the event and interpret it as cynically as you wanted, and then weigh both cases against each other to reckon with how much you credited each theory's interpretation as wholly or partly true. But at least you'd be explicit about your methodology.
A lot of anti-radical historiography doesn't do that. It implicitly employs some political theory that interprets humans in individualistic, egoistic terms, and then holds any argument to the contrary to a higher standard than it holds itself. Of course, it is easier to believe depressing ideas than uplifting ones, since the latter carry with them a pleasant taste that might interfere with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, whereas we assume that no one believes something morbid if they can otherwise help it. Thus cynical, depressing claims get held to a lower evidentiality standard, which would probably be fine, if this was at least said so explicitly - and in doing that, one would have to drop a lot of the accompanying smugness.
For that reason, saying that a Marxist or Anarchist or post-Colonial whatever theorist is extrapolating beyond the explicit implications of their evidence isn't actually a counterargument if their theory provides them with tools to infer what might lie between the gaps. If you can find evidence that directly contradicts some of the inferences they've made about those empty spaces, then you have a good rebuttal, and Fox does have a great number of these, but his tendency to then make (I assume) Rational Choice Theory-informed inferences of his own does make the smug dismissals of his opponents rather grating to engage with. Either commit to the archive or commit to your invisible theory. You can't do both.
Overall, Fox does not really disprove the radical Rediker paradigm, however much his conclusion boasts to the contrary. He most certainly disproves the more exaggerated claims about pirates being complete free-wheeling no-rules anomalies in world history... but few post-1990s radical pirateologists make that claim anyway. What Fox actually does is bring a great deal of nuance to the field, helping redirect attention to the specific dynamics of pirate power structures, which can then help us understand how their cultures interacted with the larger political, social, and economic systems around them. If Fox had acknowledged that this was his achievement I'd have given this five stars, regardless of its annoying quirks, but in declaring a killing blow he hasn't made, he misrepresents everything that is most interesting about his own arguments.
Pirate studies went through something of a civil war from the 1980s-2010s. It all started when B.R. Burg and Christopher Hill threw down a gauntlet inviting historians to study the social basis of piracy, to look beyond the romantic images of black flags and sadistic treasure hunters to see if there were any coherent political motivations at play, with this call being most forcefully answered by Marcus Rediker who dominated the subsequent wave of radical scholarship. There were dozens of strands to this, all asking various questions about how admirable or rebellious 18th century pirates were according to contemporary political values. Were pirates gay bandits sailing the seven seas in search of a good spot for sodomy? Were they some kind of anarchists? Were they proto-communists? Or as E.T. Fox himself once argued, were they actually Jacobite renegades, counter-cultural edgelords performatively pining for the return of the Stuarts and the rolling back of the 1688 Glorious Revolution?
Against these heady theories (of which there are far too many for me to list here) there then rose a school of more curmudgeonly historians. David Cordingly, Peter Earle, and, mostly vehemently of all, Arne Bialuschewski, all took turns trying to fact check the more radical arguments, presenting pirates instead as bloodthirsty monsters that only some sick fool or delusional ideologues would ever want to admire. To them the glorification of pirates in pop-culture and academia wasn't just historically inaccurate; it was morally deranged.
Of course the radicals hit back with their own arguments. Most of our sources on pirates were written by their enemies. Their violence was hardly exceptional when you look at what 'legitimate' governments did at the time. And whatever else, pirates did have democratic structures aboard their ships, something that could hardly be said of the land-based governments that the conservative historians implicitly or explicitly suggest should hold our admiration instead.
Most of this ended up turning into a highly unproductive mud-slinging match. It only really ended with the rise of the Maritime Historiographical approach in pirate studies, typified by Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, which cut through a lot of the controversy by widening the scope of what counted as 'pirate history', and linking the politics of piracy to land-based communities that deepened and complicated our understanding of these actors, turning them from free-wheeling adventurers of the oceans into opportunistic transnational agents cultivating loyalty with colonial allies, local economies, and corrupt governors. Whatever the politics at play in these exchanges, they're harder to neatly categorise into tidy libertarian formulas.
The Maritime paradigm has its own flaws, buts the timing of its arrival was unfortunate for this seldom-cited doctoral thesis that attempted to lay the radical Rediker-dominated paradigm to rest for good, only for it to arrive just as scholars were already moving onto something more novel anyway, which is the only reason I can think for why it doesn't come up more often.
Taking issue with some of the... more extravagant claims about how pirate democracies worked, Fox argued that pirate ships (a) had more rules and regulations than historians usually realise; (b) those radical features were often inspired by political/social structures from land societies anyway, rather than being invented out of thin air; and (c) pirates did not want to live forever on the oceans, but instead used piracy as a way to quickly gain the riches required to climb the social ladder.
Some of these points are strongly argued. One fascinating highlight is his casual revision of the narrative of Bonny and Read being disguised as men. Instead he points out that Woodes Rogers' declaration calling for their arrest for the theft of the William already lists them by name as women, meaning that even colonial governments knew their gender within (at most) 30 days of their first act of piracy, which suggests their crewmates likely knew as well. If this interpretation is accepted then this radically overturns most narratives of the pair, since it suggests that they were accepted as women from the beginning of their adventures, which has fascinating implications for how pirate crews first formed their composition and cultures.
What you get with Fox is therefore the most sustained example of anti-radical source criticism out there, and for the most part he does a fantastic job debunking the wilder claims. Unfortunately, he also has a habit of going too far with this. Some radical arguments really are quite silly, but Marcus Rediker is seldom so extreme as Fox's selective quotations make him sound, whilst Gabriel Kuhn is never mentioned, despite him having pruned the radical arguments into a much stronger and more nuanced position that Fox would have been better off treating as a steel-man to charge against. For one thing, Fox seems to operate under the misapprehension that pirate ships having rules and discipline means they couldn't be libertarian - which fundamentally misunderstands what most anarchist theorists believe about libertarian social structures in the first place.
Second, whilst his observations about how pirates were inspired by land-based institutions and political structures are mostly pretty good, I don't understand why that means pirates don't get credited for innovating on those structures or extending their logic in more radical ways, especially since he is willing to concede the concept of iterative innovation far more charitably to thinkers in other decades. One particularly clunky argument Fox makes is that:
"some of those restrictions [pirates placed on each other], such as the limitation of the right of the individual to renounce his pirate ‘citizenship’ and quit the company, were aimed at liberties that others at different times considered fundamental." (236)
Yes, Dr Fox. Political philosophers in the 1790s did have different political ideas to labouring seamen in the 1710s. "Others at different times" manages to displace both categories in its own comparison, making any evaluation under that rubric utterly meaningless. This sentence probably slots alongside "presencing that presences without presence and without presences" as one of the most galaxy-brained sentences I have ever found in a published academic text. Bravo.
Thirdly, I'm not sure I quite follow how Fox has used some of his data to reach his desired conclusions. During one section where he quite emphatically tries to prove that pirates did not innovate in their pay structures, instead copying them from legalised privateering practice, his data on Table 4 predominantly compares pirate pay rates to privateers from the 1740s onwards... twenty years after the Golden Age of piracy had ended. Considering David Starkey's argument that privateers copied pirate pay structures due to their effectiveness at motivating crews to commit to their work, it would seem that Fox's data actually supports Starkey's case... i.e. the complete opposite of Fox's own interpretation.
Finally, there's a faintly smug quality that one gets in a lot of anti-radical pirate history that at some point has to be addressed; namely, its implicit bragging that theirs is a strict, sober worldview, far apart from the ideologically driven claims of their opponents.
The purpose of political theory is that it helps codify a worldview, giving a structure within which one can organise empirical data and attempt to extrapolate a comprehensible answer from the complexity of real world chaos. Part of what history-from-below historiography does is take the limited data we have, hold it up to a satanic light, and see what might be suggested on the underside of the page that our ancestors chose to write on. Of course, history-from-below can become utterly bastardised by malpractice, magical thinking, and grotesque decontextualisation of selective quotes, and these faults blight radical pirate historiography at every level. Much as I love this school, I can't help feeling a healthy sense of glee whenever Bialuschewski or Fox upend some of the radical pretensions that are obscuring our understanding of history. I have no loyalty here; I love watching academics yanking the rug out from under each other, even when the answers disappoint the dearer cockles of my romantic heart.
Nevertheless, both Fox and Bialuschewski in particular have a habit of treating their lack of a theoretical framework as therefore somehow especially committed to to sober principles of archival scholarship in comparison to the more theoretically-informed approaches of their opponents. If a claim isn't supported by the the documents we find in the archives, they claim, we should disregard it from academic study.
But the things is... they actually do have a habit of making the same kind of extrapolations as the radicals do from their sources, inferring motives and speculating on connective details in the ways that their documentation does not explicitly support. The catch is that it's often difficult to spot when they're doing this because (a) they don't admit that they have a worldview, which the radicals at least have the good grace to do; (b) they probably don't realise they are doing this because they haven't explicitly committed to a theoretical framework (although from the way Fox approvingly cites The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates and echoes many of its formulations of pirate motivations, you can assume that he is strongly influenced by some form of Rational Choice Theory); and (c) the worldview/theories they have unconsciously committed to are cynical ones.
Put simply, if someone saw a video a woman shooting a man in the head before taking his money, most people's worldviews would probably make them credulous to a cynical interpretation of that behaviour. If some plucky interloper chirped up to say 'No, actually, the woman shooting the other guy in the head had a really idealistic motivation and probably went to go give that money to a dog orphanage, since the person she shot was a thief responsible for starving a million puppies' you will almost certainly disbelieve that interpretation in the absence of very strong evidence. But imagine that you then found out that the shooter in this story was later publicly tortured and executed by the victim's brother, who did so using a set of gallows made from fresh dog bones produced in his factory, 'Kennel Crusher Inc.' from which local legends for the next 6 centuries still said the surrounding hills were constantly echoing from the sound of howling animals. Oh, and the video had a watermark on it from 'Stagecraft necro-porium.com'.
Contextually, these details are pretty suggestive, but on their own they don't actually disprove any cynical interpretations of the woman's behaviour. Her victim could coincidentally be an evil bastard without making her a radical assassin raging against the puppy-necrofurniture industry. Nevertheless, if you applied a political theory that was structured around understanding political actions as informed and represented through certain matrixes of established power structures, then you might, on the whole, be willing to credit the more idealistic interpretation so long as you emphasised that you were interpreting this evidence through a particular theoretical framework. Of course you could then put another political theory onto the event and interpret it as cynically as you wanted, and then weigh both cases against each other to reckon with how much you credited each theory's interpretation as wholly or partly true. But at least you'd be explicit about your methodology.
A lot of anti-radical historiography doesn't do that. It implicitly employs some political theory that interprets humans in individualistic, egoistic terms, and then holds any argument to the contrary to a higher standard than it holds itself. Of course, it is easier to believe depressing ideas than uplifting ones, since the latter carry with them a pleasant taste that might interfere with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, whereas we assume that no one believes something morbid if they can otherwise help it. Thus cynical, depressing claims get held to a lower evidentiality standard, which would probably be fine, if this was at least said so explicitly - and in doing that, one would have to drop a lot of the accompanying smugness.
For that reason, saying that a Marxist or Anarchist or post-Colonial whatever theorist is extrapolating beyond the explicit implications of their evidence isn't actually a counterargument if their theory provides them with tools to infer what might lie between the gaps. If you can find evidence that directly contradicts some of the inferences they've made about those empty spaces, then you have a good rebuttal, and Fox does have a great number of these, but his tendency to then make (I assume) Rational Choice Theory-informed inferences of his own does make the smug dismissals of his opponents rather grating to engage with. Either commit to the archive or commit to your invisible theory. You can't do both.
Overall, Fox does not really disprove the radical Rediker paradigm, however much his conclusion boasts to the contrary. He most certainly disproves the more exaggerated claims about pirates being complete free-wheeling no-rules anomalies in world history... but few post-1990s radical pirateologists make that claim anyway. What Fox actually does is bring a great deal of nuance to the field, helping redirect attention to the specific dynamics of pirate power structures, which can then help us understand how their cultures interacted with the larger political, social, and economic systems around them. If Fox had acknowledged that this was his achievement I'd have given this five stars, regardless of its annoying quirks, but in declaring a killing blow he hasn't made, he misrepresents everything that is most interesting about his own arguments.
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