Most boys grow up wanting to be a pirate at some stage, and that’s certainly going to be true now, after Johnny Depp et al have reinforced the stereotype for a new generation.
On another level, the classic pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth century have been re-assessed by the likes of Hakim Bey (Pirate Utopias) and Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker (The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic). In these historical narratives, the pirate ship is a democracy of social revolutionaries, rejecting the cruelty and authority of empire.
The inescapable fact is that piracy involves violence and suffering inflicted against the innocent; it may also be true that the pirates are themselves the victims of, and rebels against, a system that utilizes far greater violence in order to preserve itself – or it may not. It’s much easier to be romantic about pirates who died two hundred years ago, that’s for sure.
Nevertheless, pirates are alive and well today – and are a big problem in this part of the world. Some will be social rejects defying the forces of economic globalization, some will be criminals out for loot, others yet will be terrorists seeking funds. Probably, there’s a lot of overlap, and of movement between categories. This is the sort of territory explored by John Robb in Global Guerillas. It would be fascinating to hear the stories of these modern-day pirates in their own words: their own narrative of how they came to be who they are, of the societies that sustain them, and the economies they build around their activities.
That’s not likely to happen, I guess, so we only hear one side of the story – but that’s interesting enough, when you hear the details of what’s happening away from the headlines, on the fringes of the shipping lanes that tie our global economy together. Via a post on Boing Boing, I found an article – The Pirate Hunters – from the Smithsonian Magazine, which makes fascinating reading.
