₽rivateering and Smuggling

Elements of Privateering

Original Definition:

Legalized theft and warfare against commerce on the high seas.

Modern Defintion

Usurpation of Government or public functions for private profit

₽rivateers engage in the following:

Filibustering
Private warfare against unorganized places or countries the country the privateer is at war with.
Smuggling
Usually private sea captains would do legal trade with whoever they could. But often privateers would engage in illegal smuggling if it made them money.
Slave Trade
Privateers often combined private warfare elements with smuggling by grabbing people for sale like they were any other good for sale. The Navies would even recruit their own sailors by grabbing them from ports and "pressing them" to service. Privateer sailors were often little better than slaves.
Piracy
One reason that the saying "Dead men Tell no tales" is that if a privateer took a prize of a ship not at war, if nobody survived to rat them out, and no evidence could be found of a crime, the now pirate could continue to pretend to be a privateer. This led to some confusion among pirate captains. The famous Captain Kidd of the 1700s went to England to argue his case that he had been a legal privateer, not a pirate. He was hung as a pirate. Many pirate/privateers got away with that.
Private government and colonization.
Private government was always an element in privateering. King James granted them the East India Company charter in 1600. This was the real beginning of the Tory Party and of the movement to modern Privateering. But when Christopher Columbus got his permission to sail west, it was with the aim of establishing private government in the lands he discovered.

Privateering And Large Scale Swindles

The theme of piracy and privateering to describe our current economic system, much of our current political system, and the ideology of our modern Republican Business classes. Not that Democrats aren't sometimes pirates and privateers. It is just not their stated ideology.

Privateering is at the heart of the worst of modern capitalism; the "privateering spirit. As I've noticed before privateering is defined as using private enterprises to accomplish missions assigned to government. Initially the term was window dressing for legal piracy. As I've noted before both the British Navy and the USA navy emerged from the private navies of legal pirates like Sir Francis Drake. The successful descendants of pirates became the lords and barons of British Society, and more importantly of British foreign trade, adventurism and the admirals of the fleet.

For more Information on this history:

Origins of the East India Company

Pirate Contracts

The heart of the matter is that modern business relies on contractual relationships, and ₽rivateering relies on the inequity of contracts that involve power relationships. The difference between a pirate and a privateer is that privateers are bound by contracts that grant them license, and use those contracts to abuse law and power.

To illustrate, Pirates, were simply outlaws. For that reason pirate ships often were more democratic and the officers and crew more free, aboard ship, than the crews of privateers, who were often little more than slaves to ambitious, greedy power hungry captains. However, the ideal privateer operated his ship as if it were a pirate ship and treated their crew with respect. Thus the lines between pirate and privateer were often blurred. On land they had to follow rules. At sea "dead men tell no tales" was often practiced to avoid getting caught by officials while robbing and stealing at sea while ostensibly doing legitimate business. The result was the legal pirates were often hanging known pirates. Privateers have always tended to be pirates. But pirates rarely get to be privateers unless they can manage to avoid being caught.

Modern Privateers

Modern privateers don't need eye patches, peg legs. They wear Armani suits and carry briefcases. They enslave through contracts, loans, lawsuits and hostile takeovers. No need for cannon. They frequently own (or are) Judges and law enforcement. But when the cops are the criminals, who will enforce the law? Piracy led to privateering and privateering enabled:

• Private Warfare, Filibustering, legalized robbery and looting.
• Conquest and colonization
• Vast estates for the successful Pirates
• Layers of Oppression

Power establishes Inequitable relationships established through abusive contracts and debt. The robbed can be robbed over and over again. Privateers would do anything for trade goods and property:

• Smuggling to acquire trade goods
• Monopoly over vital properties
• Rent from that property

So the irony of modern privateers is that often they are playing all sides. Robbing people, and arresting robbers. Smuggling and arresting smugglers. Bribing people and taking Bribes. Piracy attracts con artists and grifters. A Grifter is a con artist who has a plan B for avoiding getting caught. Grift + Drift to new marks. Privateering only works when the pirates can attract a crew and governments can hire them. Since it is based on looting, it hollows out any actual capital that might have been there.

Modern pirates operate through the use of contracts, courts and information and power disparity. This post is about their historic involvement in drug smuggling.

Piracy, Privateering and Smuggling = "Sea Dogs"

It is well documented that "sea dogs", many of whom were both pirates, privateers and smugglers, were heavily involved in the "Triangular Trade", but they also were involved in the "China Trade", which sought riches from long voyages to the "far east", China, Burma, Thailand and India. Both trades were heavily mixed up in smuggling and piracy.

Sea Dogs

Sea Dog Privateers smuggled slaves and other trade goods in the Triangular trade between the Americas, Africa and Europe. But they smuggled drugs and other trade goods in the "China Trade." Wars were fought over these trades. Wars between rival trading companies and merchants, wars between rival trading countries and wars on the trading partners to enforce inequitable contracts or steal trade goods (loot) to sell elsewhere. They would trade together, betray each other, and then redo their alliances going with the flow of the marriages and divorces of the rulers of their countries.

European Mafias

European "Sea Dogs" thus were little different from land Mafias. The Sea Dog Tradition is at the foundation of many American and British "noble" families. The behavior of a Sir Francis Drake was little different from that of the Corleones in the Godfather. Nobles were discouraged from working for a living. But stealing, murdering and filibustering were all "honorable." But for many of the European and British Gentry it was perfectly "honorable" to engage in sea trade and/or steal wealth. At least as long as you didn't get caught.

China Trade

The Portuguese beat the Brits to China by nearly a century, landing trading posts in Macao and later Ningpo, Foochow, and Amoy. But the British East India Company lost a fleet in 1596 and were beaten out of China when they tried again in 1637. They finally got a legal trading post in Taiwan in 1672, ten years after the Dutch were expelled for infractions. From Taiwan they were able to trade with Amoy, Chusan and Canton. By 1700 they were confined to Canton, where their factory was confined, along with all the foreign merchants.

“most foreign traders were confined in Canton, where rigid restrictions were imposed through the practice of Co-hong, a guild of Chinese merchants, the sole recognized agency between foreign and Chinese merchants. The Hongs were the only merchants licensed by the Chinese officials to deal with the foreign traders. They were made responsible not only for all business deals with foreigners, but for their debts and behaviour as well.”

The Hongs were the merchant class and, similar to merchants among the Europeans,

“the merchant class was traditionally despised by the mandarin class in China. The Hong merchants, as a result, could not enjoy the full rights of profiting from the trade. They were under the jurisdiction of a local governor and a customs officer who was required to pay a large sum every year to the government”

These officials were frequently corrupt, and so frequently the layers of officials recouped their own tax burden:

“by levying heavy taxes on foreign ships (including one for measuring the length of incoming ships) and by taking huge cuts from the deals made by the Hong merchants, who in their turn passed the tax burden to the foreign traders.”

For that reason, the trading companies were formed to try to counter:

“The limited trading ports and the exorbitant fees paid to the customs officer via Hong merchants”

The British of the East India Company solved this problem of “restrictions imposed by the local officials at Canton” by first sending a royal envoy to the Imperial Court at Peking to negotiate a preferential treaty. They sent repeated ambassadors:

1. Lord George Macartney (1737 - 1806) in September 1792 and the voyage lasted nearly a year. Failed
2. by Lord Amherst went to China in 1816 and, failed.

From the British perspective this was a quandary. The Chinese were running a tight shipping business.

By the 18th century they traded British woolens and Indian cottons for Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk. Tea imports had become the largest single item in Britain's trading account. Conversely, the export to China of British and Indian goods began to decline and trade imbalance between Britain and China occurred as a result. The shortage of silver to pay for the tea imports forced the British to seek other commodities to compensate for the loss and to bring in profit.

The British Mafia

So they began smuggling Drugs:

They discovered opium, a highly lucrative commodity. Although never directly involved in the sale of opium, which was banned in China by Imperial edict of 1729 as an illegal drug, the East India Company was responsible for most of its production in India, mainly for its medicinal value. The actual business of selling opium was conducted through private agencies.

They might not have been involved in the final sales to the consumer, but they worked with criminals and corrupt hongs to smuggle drugs to Chinese Merchants who then smuggled them into the interior. Hence places like Hong Kong started as pirate dens where smugglers came to sell opium.

“In 1833, the jealously-protected monopoly of the East India Company was finally abolished and the China trade was opened to the competition of dozens of British companies, who had been petitioning the government and lobbying members of Parliament for free trade for years. Soon after that it became evident that opium traffic had turned into the sole profitable business for British companies in southern China. By 1830s, opium flooded the entire black market in China and, inevitably, became a major cause of concern for the Chinese Government.”

The Chinese had a drug problem, and the narcissistic British were getting rich. The British Mafia was companies like the East India and the "free-booting" competition the British enabled in 1833. American Ships were part of this "freebooting trade." Around 1840:

“A Chinese official in Canton, Commissioner Lin, ordered the confiscation of some 20,000 chests of opium from English ships and refused to pay indemnity to the British traders. This incident outraged the British and triggered the first Opium War.”

British merchants may not have sold opium on the streets in the interior of China however, they seem to have had relations with Chinese Pirates & smugglers. The Chinese operated pirate bases at Zhoushan (Chusan), with Japanese Pirates from 1530-1560. The Japanese also used pirates to conduct trade with the rest of the world. In 1840 the Chinese were punished for not maintaining a strong Navy and keeping up with advances in technology. They were humiliated and their coast was turned into a series of colonies.

“This lasted two years and resulted in a treaty which caused Hong Kong to be ceded to the British Crown for 150 years and five Chinese ports, Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai to be opened to foreign traders.”

Triangular Trade

The Triangular Trade operated similarly in Africa. In that local the fragmentation and size of the cultures on the African Culture enabled wholesale smuggling and slavery. In the 1800s the slave trade was abolished, followed by the direct enslavement and carving up of Africa by Europeans on the pretext of fighting the slave trade. But that is for another post. The point is all this piracy and smuggling was legal. It was justified as "free trade" but it really was free booting.

More On this

"The Ideology of Privateering"

Privateering takes many forms;

Legal piracy with a "letter of marquee", Freebooting,

filibustering (private war), Privatizing Government functions,

The model for the modern multinational company is starting to look like the example of the East India Company.

Privateering as Organized looting

As long as pirates and their ideology dominate Wall Street, a boom and bust cycle will continue to be a means for enriching the few while looting the many. The continued use of contracts and usurpation of government function, trickery and outright warfare to usurp properties and self governing functions from people worldwide means the rise of a worldwide mob of, what are essentially pirates. The term for this is Kakikracy and it leads to bad, tyrannical government, not any kind of freedom for the many. The ills of the modern world trace to the freebooting attitude of conquest and exploitation. Building colonial empires around the world was robbery. Those methods for extracting wealth, were ultimately self destructive. But they are so tempting that successor movements have wound up using the same techniques for making people miserable.

This was drafted a long time ago. I need to publish it now. But I will come back and parr it down some more.