The pirate sector

Atlantic buccaneers had black and white sailors working alongside each other. In the Mediterranean, Barbary corsairs carried a mix of European and Arab sailors and Turkish janissaries. “Lingua franca” was a pirate language that spread through the Mediterranean so cosmopolitan pirate crews could communicate. “Pirate republics” in places such as Madagascar, Morocco, Haiti and the Bahamas were run along quasi-utopian principles, with outlaws of different backgrounds freely mingling.

Leeson, a professor at George Mason University in the US, turns this viewpoint on its head. He envisages pirates as free market radicals who illustrated Adam Smith’s maxim about people supposedly acting out of self-interest, the “invisible hand” of history. “Serving others’ interests gets them to cooperate with us, serving our own,” Leeson explains.