🏴☠️ WEEK 2: Robbery Changed Since the Golden Age of Piracy
How we've evolved from a wild, semi-governed society with trade under constant threat of robbery & heists to a world where highwaymen and pirates are actually quite rare.
In yesterday’s comments about Captain Avery,
pointed out that:Except for the incident where the captain and loyal crew members are sent off in a boat (rather than killed), ever character seems completely amoral, looking only after his own immediate advantage. I get the impression that even the parties who were cheated would have done the same in reverse if they had had the cleverness or opportunity to do so.
We had a brief discussion about high trust vs. low trust societies, which reminded me of the explanation in the preface of how piracy fundamentally worked.
the pirates at sea, have the same sagacity with robbers at land; as the latter understand what roads are most frequented, and where it is most likely to meet with booty, so the former know what latitude to lie in, in order to intercept ships;
So, obviously I am not an expert in various forms of theft. But I have the impression that (the Somali coast aside) this is not really how modern robbery works anymore. Outside of movies, we don’t really have heists like this, not to the point where it’s a normal fear for merchants and traders1. There are too many police and soldiers to make it viable — governments are much stronger than they used to be.
Golden Age Piracy seems very like railroad and stagecoach robbery, and I imagine the horseback raiders attacking the Silk Road during times of unrest acted similarly. These days, though, I feel like the only “trade route robbery” we really see is Somali piracy, and I think that has less to do with the proximity to the Red Sea trade route and more to do with the unrest in the region.
There’s also Mexican cartel kidnappings, I suppose, but that feels more tourism related than trade related.
I wonder if the rise of productivity and plenty has made it easier for most people to avoid a short, brutish life of raiding and crime. But is that an effect of media skewing things or have things really changed? Certainly, some things have... we don't see much in the way of aristocratic ransoms, or looting, being how soldiers make their fortunes anymore, either.
From the introduction —
English merchants, in particular, have suffered more by their depredations, than by the united force of France and Spain, in the late war
This line really reminded me of how it used to be the case that disease killed more than enemy swords and bullets. For all the complaints about globalization and ‘world police,’ it strikes me as a very good thing that these sorts of depredations are not a leading cause of death for modern-day merchants.
What’s something about the changing nature of crime that stood out to you in the preface & introduction?
Note the weasel word. Bank robberies do occasionally still happen! The biggest recent heist I found was back in 2004 — the Northern Bank robbery in Belfast, Ireland.
This made me think about cybercrime, mostly. We don't have a lot of highway robberies, partly because we rarely ship expensive material goods through uncontrolled territories. We move money through the internet! And if I was going to ship a boatload of diamonds, I would probably fly it between two very secure airports.
On the other hand, cyberattacks, including phishing, are comparatively rampant. Also, kind of like naval piracy, there is a lot of complicated discussions about rival governments and whether or not those rings get support from the (for example) Russian government, even if it is just tacit lack of care.
Beyond that, Avery's story reminded me of a lot of modern criminal stories: he was very competent at a select set of weird things, but he also just ... didn't think through how to liquidate his diamonds? But, also, how many large crime documentaries follow the pattern of someone being really smart until they aren't? And, in a particular set of irony, this made me think of Ross Ubricht and The Silk Road, wherein his downfall was in trying to unsucessfully hire a hitman because of money & criminals, which just seems like the sort of trouble that Avery would have gotten into.
The concept of trust as the factor for pirate society is interesting, however I’m always struck by how much infrastructure and society pirates are portrayed as needing. There’s always a safe port where booty is traded for supplies (necessary and not). Those operating these ports seem to not fear for themselves or their livelihood. This could be a Robin Hood like portrayal where the “poor” don’t fear those who steal from the “rich,” buy I’m not sure.
Modern day crime seems to almost disproportionately affect the poor rather than the rich. They have less to lose and often can only be robbed of their person (labor, life, etc.) and not just their booty. While it is possible this is just ignored by our narrator given his lens, it feels unlikely.
It is highly likely that those of us participating in this reading are more likely pirate targets than pirates or pirate “friends.”
Unrelatedly, I love quotation marks today.