The Pirate Menace
Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy
Angus Konstam, Osprey, 2024, 384 pages
Book Review published on: September 18, 2025
Say the word "pirate," and you'll find it means many things to different people. To the layman, it might generate a mental image of Johnny Depp in costume for a Disney movie. For a naval officer, it might elicit a war story about deployments with the Combined Maritime Forces off Somalia. If you were of a certain age at the turn of the millennium, it might be associated with the use of Napster or other various file sharing programs to build a personal music collection. In Tampa, Florida, pirates are an attraction for tourists during the annual citywide Gasparilla festival. To fans of Dave Barry, it's an excuse annually for saying "Yaarrr!" and "Shiver me Timbers!" on 19 September.
For a pirate historian like Angus Konstam, however, pirates and piracy are more likely to be associated with the maritime practice of privateers as a naval augment force. Especially common in the Age of Sail, governing authorities would use letters of marque legitimizing the actions of ordinary sailors as an act of statecraft, which would transform merchant ships and fishing vessels into naval marauders. Lest the reader think this is an obscure act of a bygone era, it is an authority still held by the U.S. Congress in 2024, enshrined in article 1, section 8 of the American Constitution: "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water."
The veneer of authority provided by these letters of marque made all the difference between lawless maritime theft and legitimate naval enforcement. This posed a problem before the era of instant communication when a ship at sea might not know a war had ended and the former enemy was no longer an approved target. Even if a privateer was aware its letter of marque had been rescinded, there was a natural reluctance of the crew to abrupt unemployment. From the perspective of the victimized ship, the differences between an approved privateer or a rogue pirate vessel were hard to distinguish when muskets and cutlasses were drawn.
The peak era of piracy according to Konstam, in his book The Pirate Menace: Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy, is a period in the early eighteenth century that reflects a confluence of critical factors, including (1) contentious geopolitics in Europe and its overseas colonial empires, (2) the state of contemporary maritime labor relations, and (3) economic disruption caused by a natural disaster.
In the late 1600s and early 1700s, Spain, Great Britain, and France were frequently at odds, with European conflict spilling over to contested claims in the New World. Queen Anne's War (1702--1713) and strategic British holdings in Jamaica gave privateers a lucrative opportunity against Spanish merchant traffic, shipping New World gold and other riches, spawning a Caribbean industry. The end of the war didn't mean these privateers and their crews vanished overnight, but it did sometimes mean a dwindling of European interest in the maintenance and protection of its colonies. This left responsibility to local authorities (or lack thereof) who sometimes perpetuated arrangements with some of these same privateers as a local navy.
Local corruption, and lack of attention from Europe, allowed wider discretion to privateers' activities if the colonial governor was benefiting. This was magnified in 1715 when a disastrous hurricane wiped out a fleet of tributary wealth bound from North America to Spain. A literal gold rush resulted from the ensuing salvage. In a hazardous profession and in an era of virulent disease, inhospitable natives, and rival maritime raiders, whether privateers held the legitimacy of a letter of marque mattered less than the profit available and the limited consequences from authority. Crews found haven in Caribbean port settlements where greedy leaders were openly complicit in salvage theft, or where outmatched local populations made rational choices to turn a blind eye when the alternative was to become targets of pirate pillaging.
If the state of European national rivalries was kindling, and the 1715 hurricane was a match, the flame of piracy was often the conditions ordinary sailors lived under. The captain of an ordinary ship was an unquestioned authority, and many of them were harsh and cruel, expecting to be followed without first earning the right to lead. Further, profits were held by officers and land-based financers rather than shared with the crew. Konstam observes in contrast that many pirate crews were self-organizing with leadership emerging through consensus. Power was often shared among several individuals, especially the quartermaster, not just the captain, and plunder was more equitably distributed. This resulted in more humane conditions shipboard and better morale and loyalty among pirate crews than a traditional vessel with seamen pressed into duty. Given a choice, ordinary sailors could hardly be faulted for seeking perceived better pay and working conditions!
Konstam's tale holds continuing relevancy, as geopolitical competition, the unrest of the economically disadvantaged, and the potential for climate change---induced catastrophe are all present today. It does not take much to imagine the anarchic state that could emerge from an earthquake or volcanic eruption in the right location and at the right magnitude strength, or how various nation states and multinational entities could try to capitalize. What's interesting to note for the modern thinker is the carrot and stick approach that Konstam says solved the problem of Caribbean piracy in the early 1700s. It was a tempting message of deterrence to see a pirate hanging from the yardarm. However, in addition to maritime enforcement by European navies, many pirates were brought back into the mainstream through variations on amnesty programs that provided forgiveness and gave ordinary pirate sailors opportunities to return to legitimate employment. For every hardcore radical, there were many more individuals just doing what they thought was best to get by. In more modern times, Napster was ended as much by having the legal alternative of iTunes as it was by policing and copyright lawsuits. The policy challenge is to avoid the tendency for retribution and punishment and focus on incentives that steer people towards outcomes of desired behavior.
Book Review written by: Matthew Kiefer, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas