Economics of Piracy in the Americas in the 16th-18th Centuries
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Date
2022-08-19
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Abstract
Piracy in the Americas is a popular topic for the public and academics alike. Unfortunately, this has led to a significant amount of sensationalizing about what it meant to be a pirate, especially at its peak in the Americas. The goals of this research laid out in Chapter I are to demystify pirates and map out the evolution of what it meant to be a pirate in practice, along with the economic mechanisms that allowed piracy to briefly exist in the 17th and 18th centuries on a scale that has not been seen since.
Chapter II is a dive into the history of pirates in the Americas. Starting with smugglers and pirate activity in the Mediterranean and along African shores, to the evolution of American pirates as an entity, and the establishment of pirate-controlled islands in the Caribbean. Finally, it explores the economic reasons behind the rapid decline in piracy in the early 18th century, namely the increased costs of being a pirate against growing world powers.
Chapter III goes deeper into the mechanisms of piracy and how the problems of organization were dealt with by those outside the law. This section details the circumstances that made smuggling profitable in the Americas in the 17th century. It then transitions to how high-seas pirates were able to develop economic mechanisms to coexist on a large scale, why the frequent changes in the definition of a pirate boosted solidarity, and how pirates created a profitable industry while directly fighting governments with a global reach.
Finally, this analysis is applied to a recently discovered pirate shipwreck belonging to the infamous Captain Kidd. Kidd’s wreck is compared with other known pirate wrecks and analyzed under the lens of economic archaeology to uncover a deeper significance for the vessel’s remains outside of the historical record.
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Economic Archaeology, Maritime Archaeology, Pirates, Economic Sociology