The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates

It exceeded my expectations by far. A lot of the things we believe about the pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth century are more fiction than fact. Pirates being a bunch of crazy, violent thugs? Yeah well they are thugs for sure, but it turns out that pirates really tried hard to avoid having to use violence to get what they wanted. This book not only explain a lot about how the pirate ship pretty much functioned like a firm, for example by building a pirate brand: a reputation of being brutal and crazy. It also explain why it was on these pirate ships that we see the earliest examples of democratic rulings being established, with sophisticated institutions of governance and separations of power.

Leeson reúne aquí varios de sus ensayos sobre la organización de los piratas en el siglo XVII con la idea común que la búsqueda del beneficio privado condujo a resultados sociales deseables en un entorno de auto-regulación, fuera de la ley. Muy bien documentado, destaca sobre todo por la coherencia y originalidad de sus ideas. Fantástico.

This book produces what it promised ... an analysis of pirate behaviours and practices from a fairly pure economic perspective. Leeson writes in a fluent and accessible style and injects about the right amount of historical data. Too little would have made me feel like I ought to have read up on the golden age of piracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before I started on this book. Too much may have made the book drag on a bit. He has chosen the events carefully to support his arguments and keep the interest level from flagging. His research appears to have been comprehensive. Although he is an self-confessed pirate tragic, he keeps the voice he uses in the book clinical enough to be convincing rather than romantic. The pirates were rogues, robbers and driven by greed but not usually gratuitously violent or vicious. It's an informative and entertaining book which I enjoyed.

Some fascinating insights into how societies build their rules & behaviours. It does feel like it's been stretched out to fill a book and towards the end it gets a bit preachy about how greed is good rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.

Item received in good condition

Dieses Buch ist höchst originell. Es betrachtet ein historisches Phänomen - nämlich das der Piraten um 1790 - aus einem völlig anderen Blickwinkel. Es zeigt exemplarisch wie sich ökonomische Prinzipen und Demokratie einander bedingen. Ein ideales Buch für Neu-, Quer- und Andersdenker... und ein optisch wunderschön gemachtes Buch noch dazu.