Piracy is as old as the use of the oceans in commerce. A pirate is a thief who operates on the ocean. However, due to the way this world works, a pirate can be a "legitimate businessman" or a "common thief" depending on who they attack and rob, and how they do it. There are some real differences between a pirate and a privateer:
- Privateers do their thefts "legally"
- Privateers don't share their loot
- Privateers often get to hang the pirates and crew-members who cross them.
- A Country that cannot protect, or control, its pirates is labeled a "Rogue State"
- Sovereignty requires controlling outlaws and pirates, especially the ones who operate on the margins of the law.
Related Posts:
Piracy as Private Warfare
Piracy also is private warfare levied against rival states (at one time it was rival city states like the Greeks versus Troy) by private ship companies. The earliest navies; Greek, British, American, were considered pirate fleets by their rivals. Therefore some kinds of piracy have always been "perfectly legit" for behaviors that would embarrass a Mafioso. When piracy, theft, private warfare, or similar are sanctioned by the State, those kind of pirates are known as "privateers." In the old days they operated under "letters of Marquee". Later they'd operate under corporate Charters. The general term for a pirate that includes crews engaging in piracy, filibustering, smuggling, private warfare and any legal or semi-legal enterprise for getting loot, is a "Sea Dog". Most of the old money families of the United States have either origins in classic Sea Dog behavior, or in modern variants. European Royalty, largely didn't make their loot at sea, but the principles were the same.
Nobility as descendants of Pirates
The origins of Nobility were in private armies and their war-leaders, who could steal, defend and hold land against anyone else. The vandals got their Tribe name turned into an adjective due to their piracy on the Mediterranean. They weren't alone. The Normans were explicitly descendants of Viking Pirates who converted to Christianity and learned French. Normans carried on a pirate tradition across the Mediterranean also. Their conquests of Sicily and interventions in Eastern Europe ended up destabilizing the Greek Byzantine Empire, which had done its share of piracy in prior times. Turks, Genoese and Venetians, when they weren't fighting each other, were engaged in privateering also across the Mediterranean. The Knights of Malta, Hospitaliers, Templars, also operated private privateer fleets. Muslims, Christians, & Jews, all had people who took to the sea to seek fortune and loot. Sometimes under legal cover, sometimes not.
Chartered Pirate Fleets
However, European countries innovated corporate charters as a kind of broad "letter of marquee" that enabled entire fleets of merchants, pirates, filibusterers (private armies), and administrators, to loot and make war on other nations without a declaration of war. It was these kinds of enterprises that drove colonialism. The East India Companies of the Dutch and British were early filibustering companies.
Filibustering
Filibustering is when private persons (pirates) wage war outside their own lands. One could call the greeks who attacked Troy, filibusterers. But classic filibusterers include:
- Henry Morgan in the 1650s,
- Andrew Jackson in Florida, 1818
- The Walkers in the 1850s on behalf of the USA in Nicaragua,
- Cecil Rhodes in South & East Africa in the 1890s.
- The British, Americans and a collection of Europeans in the Opium Wars in China
- General Smedley Butler in Central America and Haiti (1900-1920s)
- Many Many others
I've talked about all of these people before.
The East India Company & Rogue Companies 20th century.
I've detailed summaries of what I learned about the British East India company. It waged war, fielded a navy of warships and merchant ships, fielded armies, usurped, looted, and privatized government in Bengal and across SE Asia. And so alienated people in India it sparked the Sepoy Mutiny that led to Britain running India as a colony with their own troops.
Cecil Rhodes
Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) founded and controlled the British South Africa Company, which acquired Rhodesia and Zambia as British territories.
Degrading and Destroying Sovereignty
These people degraded and destroyed the sovvereignty of the countries they invaded. Central America is still a mess due to the ministrations of a long line of pirates from Henry Morgan (British) to the Walkers and more recently Smedley Butler. A country cannot be sovereign if piracy is legal:
- If public utilities and government are privatized by privateers.
- If pirates run governments for private separate advantage.
- If pirates loot and move their funds to offshore accounts (the modern equivalent of buried treasure).
- If people lose their homes and livelihood to foreign pirates and their fleets of con artist crews.
Piracy Behaviors
- Smuggling
- Enslaving people and exploiting them (prostitution, slave labor, prison labor, etc...)
- Corrupting Governments (Bribery, Extortion, & active measures)
- Usurping Government functions that generate wealth (privatization)
- Conversion, swindles, and abuse of power aimed at acquiring resources
- Extraction
Piracy and Filibustering
The Sea Dogs of the 16th and 17th century, found they could make money by smuggling slaves, precious metals, whisky and weapons. This formed the "triangular trade" sometimes punctuated by outright theft and filibustering. When slavers couldn't buy slaves, they'd sometimes raid towns and seize people to sell elsewhere. Even across the Pacific, such pirates became infamous. Dramas set on islands always image "cannibals" but cannibalism was never the threat that filibustering slavers presented to Pacific Islanders, to people near the coasts in Africa, or near the trading routes where land pirates like Arabs and Moors operated. Exploits like Henry Morgan's raids on Panama are celebrated, but when legal sea dogs went dark, "on the hunt" they did horrific things in secret, if possible.
Fishing and Whaling
Sea Dogs sometimes originated as legitimate fishermen. But when money was to be made the pirates would move in. Whaling went from something done by small time captains and local communities, into a giant extractive enterprise, when towns started implementing oil lighting. Lamp Oil came from whales. Sea-Dogs hunted them to near extinction.
Pirates and Oil
At some point the pirates making money from whale oil, came up with the idea of refining crude oil to produce kerosene. Advances in technology made this possible, but it led former sea dogs to switch their efforts to become oil barons. There is a direct connection between the Sea-Dog/Privateering tradition and the oil industry. In the 20th century, the filibustering tradition led to the creation of the Oil States in the Arabian Peninsula and the dismantling of the Turkish Empire. It led to the execution of Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah. Sometimes these factions operate in the open, but often they operate outside the law and in secret.
There are more connections. But I started this post years ago and I need to publish this and then add links to the dozens of other posts I've made on the subject. I started this post in 2015.
Further Reading
- Piracy
- Trinity Church and Captain Kidd
- Hitler the Pirate
- Privateering
- Why Privateering is Bad for Government
- how Government is and isn't a business
- Privateering
- An Ideology of Piratical Banking
- An Ideology of Privateering
- Privatization as a Tool of Privateers
- Abusive Contracts and Privateering
- Origins of the East India Company
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