Children raised in America learn all about the founding fathers and the structure of government in America, how democratic principles and checks and balances serve to help keep the country stable and secure. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Adams are just some of the names synonymous with liberty and fighting for democracy, securing peoples’ freedom of speech and guaranteeing their rights. But one economics professor wants to add pirates to the list, who he claims were “pioneers of democracy”. We like to glamorize pirates as squash-buckling privateers and treasure-hunters, but the stereotypes don’t match up to real democratic elements found on pirate vessels.

According to Peter Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, pirates had a political philosophy that was decades ahead of its time. On pirate ships there were the workings of modern government, from checks and balances to social insurance and freedom of expression. Pirates needed to create these mini-structures out of necessity, as piracy required teamwork and trust in the context of violence and lawlessness.

Pirate ships even had a primitive form of “worker’s comp”, that required much less paperwork no doubt. Losing a limb would give a sailor payment from the booty, which varied depending on the value of the limb (a right arm is more valuable than the left for most). Now that’s nice of them!

One writer has taken it a step further than Leeson, Marcus Rediker, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He said that pirate democracy was a “fascinating, almost Utopian kind of experiment” that was purer than the democracies found in Athens and Greece (drawn as inspiration by America’s founding fathers). They had written charters, everyone (black or white) was allowed to vote, and strict rules were made concerning the consumption of alcohol and behavior among women. When incidents did occur, relatively fair trials took place

Why didn’t the pirate democracy help formulate the governments of real countries? Well, the democratic “experiments” taking place on pirate ships was short-lived, and obviously pirates were not tolerated by many nations and their navies.

Even in their own time, the pirates’ democratic experiment was quickly forgotten, a culture washed away. It would be another half a century, Leeson says, before James Madison would start to devise a US Constitution. And there’s no evidence, he says, that the forefathers of British and American democracy took any of their cues from pirate ships. “The Federalists never refer back to pirates,” he says. “I’ve looked.”

That’s a shame! Though we enjoy the Hollywood version of pirates, it would be nice to see the softer, more egalitarian democratic side of pirates every once in awhile!

[Boston Globe]

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