Episode 87: Which It’s All About Pirates!

Today I talk with Steve Hahn, Professor of History at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota. He's at work on a book about several hundred men who in 1718 sought the King's pardon for piracy at Nassau in the Bahamas.

Our fascination with pirates is a little strange, but probably in 200 years there will be little kids walking around in pinstripe suits with Tommy guns pretending to be Al Capone–and while I didn't see anyone dressed like that this Halloween, I did see pirates. This long-term interest has, probably as a consequence, led to a lot of misconceptions of who pirates were and what they did. Even eminent historians often seem to think that a pirate wasn't a pirate unless they had an eyepatch and a parrot–bonus points if they also had a peg leg.

But of course, pirates were just an exotic variety of thieves. And no thief can work without a good fence. So are fences really thieves? That's one of the conundrums that we explore in this conversation.

For Further Investigation

Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea–pirates as proto-Bolsheviks
 Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age–ditto
Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates–pirates as highly rational market actors
David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates–the best one-volume introduction to the subject
Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates–a great book