Piracy in the Atlantic World

Piracy was a phenomenon that was not limited to the Caribbean region. Golden Age pirates roamed off the coast of North America, Africa and the Caribbean.

Pirates and sailors are important in understanding how the Atlantic world looked. Defying traditional alliances, attacking and capturing merchant vessels of all nations, pirates wreaked havoc on an emerging economic system, disrupted trade routes and created a crisis within an increasingly important system of trade centered on the Atlantic world. They were ready and willing participants in the exchange of people, ideas, and commodities around the Atlantic basin affecting the creation and destruction of communities.

Trade routes along the Middle Passage were one of the main cogs in establishing what is known as capitalism today. For pirates in the Atlantic World, trade routes are fortuitous, because of the vast wealth they supply in the way of cargo that moved along the Middle Passage. From 1715 to 1728, pirate activity created problems for merchant ships along the trade routes, thus halting growth during that period. As piracy along the Middle Passage increased, so did the need for owners of the merchant vessels to insure the cargo on board their ships, because not only was there threat of loss from natural disaster, there was the chance the cargo could be lost to plundering pirates. "The genius of insurance," in the way it contributes to finance capitalism, is the insistence that the real test of something's value comes not at the moment it is made or exchanged, but at the moment it is lost or destroyed.

Pirates are often equated in the modern mind with privateers and buccaneers, but neither label accurately describes piracy during the early eighteenth century. Each of these terms describes men who loot ships or settlements. The difference lies in the amount of societal acceptance that these men were afforded.

Buccaneers attacked Spanish settlements in the Caribbean late in the seventeenth century. While the Spanish were certainly not happy with these events, other countries such as the English did not mind being stronger in the region due to these attacks. The word buccaneer, a word derived from a process of curing meat, referred specifically to these men conducting these attacks, which ended well before 1700.

Privateers were sanctioned by their respective governments to raid enemy vessels. The colonization of the Atlantic saw many conflicts among the French, Spanish and English; raiding by privateers was one way to gain an advantage. The captains of these ships were given letters of marque by their governments, intended to validate all actions against the enemy.

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