The word pirate encompasses a wide variety of ancient and modern maritime predators, from the Elizabethan “privateers” who preyed on sixteenth-century Spanish shipping, to Barbary corsairs, to modern Somali hijackers. In modern popular imagination, the term most vividly brings to mind the Anglo-American freebooters who flourished in the decade or so that followed the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1713). Naval historians are in virtually unanimous agreement that outright piracy of this sort was effectively eradicated in the Atlantic by 1726, and remained rare thereafter until a brief resurgence in the 1820s. Commerce raiding was certainly widespread during wartime, but it was carried out by naval vessels and by private armed vessels (“privateers”) licensed by belligerent governments to prey on enemy merchant shipping.

In this short book, Guy Chet challenges this received wisdom, arguing that state campaigns against piracy were actually ineffective, and that piracy remained common throughout the eighteenth century both during peace and wartime. Modern historians, he argues, have been misled by court records, anti-piracy statutes, and official accounts that overstated the authority and jurisdiction of the state, into accepting a distinction between pirates and privateers that reflected official ideology but was irrelevant to contemporaries. This is a bold argument that, if accepted, would necessitate a reinterpretation of much of eighteenth-century naval history.

To support his claims, Chet leans heavily on marine insurance rates, arguing that peacetime premiums on Atlantic voyages remained relatively stable between 1650 and 1750 rather than declining due to a reduced risk of piracy. Unfortunately the available evidence on insurance rates is quite sparse, and the data are estimates drawn from a variety of sources for various routes at various times, during both peace and wartime. These scattered data appear to establish no clear pattern (pp.13–14), and in particular, as they do not distinguish rates of loss due to piracy from other causes, the claim that stable rates indicate a stable rate of piracy is necessarily rather speculative, as Chet acknowledges.

In some cases, too, Chet appears to misread his sources. For example, a key point in his argument is that

The source for this assertion, indicated in a footnote, is Ralph Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962, p. 377). What Davis actually says there, however, is that “Premiums at Amsterdam, for ships trading to Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, fell by nearly half between 1650 and 1750,” because of the reduced threat from Moorish corsairs. In other words, Davis made a limited claim that applied only to certain routes, and (contradicting Chet's assertion) Davis attributed the halving of premiums on those routes to a reduced incidence of piracy.

More data become available as we move into the mid-eighteenth century, but again offer little evidence in support of the theory of widespread and ongoing piracy. Peacetime rates were fairly low and stable, with some variation depending on the vessel, route, time of year, and so on. During wartime, in contrast, premiums rose substantially on many routes, and rates fluctuated driven by news of captures and rumors of enemy activity. This, of course, is exactly what we would expect to see if the danger of capture was primarily attributable to state-sanctioned privateering during wartime, rather than indiscriminate piracy that persisted during both war and peace. Indeed, even during wartime merchants sometimes insured against “sea risk” only, at approximately peacetime rates.

Another pillar of Chet's argument is the claim that piracy flourished because merchants and others in “local communities” supported and benefitted from piracy and viewed government efforts to suppress it as illegitimate. In particular, Chet contends that the use of marine insurance ensured that the losses caused by piracy fell on insurance underwriters rather than merchants, so that merchants on the whole “gained more by [piracy] than they lost” (p. 53). There are two main problems with this argument. First, insurance underwriters were mostly merchants themselves. In American ports, for example, before the advent of corporations in the late eighteenth century marine insurance was primarily a means of sharing risk among merchants who insured each other's ventures, and who were connected by personal and commercial ties to each other and to merchants in other ports. Second, these merchant-underwriters calibrated their premiums to the risks, so although the costs of any particular loss or capture were borne (at least in part) by underwriters, they were ultimately borne by the merchants who purchased insurance. Chet errs, for example, in asserting that “insurance insulated merchants from the financial toll of commerce raiding and eliminated incentives to avoid dangerous waters, sail in convoy, or invest in other defensive measures” (p. 57). In fact, merchants frequently directed their captains to sail in convoy (in wartime), and received lower premiums for doing so; they took pains to extol the armament and sailing qualities of their vessels to the underwriters in the hope of obtaining lower rates; and they were charged lower premiums on safer routes (for example, American vessels traveling to London during wartime generally obtained a partial return of premium if they went “North about” rather than exposing themselves to the risk of encountering French privateers in the English channel).

The claim that privateers were simply pirates is also difficult to reconcile with the extensive records of cases adjudicated in prize courts. To be sure, belligerent nations often disputed the definition of what constituted a lawful prize, and even the somewhat flexible “rules” were at times applied with prejudice. But contemporary accounts indicate the legitimacy and importance of these proceedings to the participants, as well as the possibility of acquittal if a vessel's papers established her neutrality; in other words, at least most of the time, privateering was governed by prize law. The widespread practice of the payment of ransom in exchange for the immediate release of captured vessels, the ransoms generally being paid with mere promissory notes, is further evidence of the perceived legitimacy, and legal force, of privateering captures.

Chet draws an interesting parallel between the failure of state efforts to contain smuggling—which flourished during much of the eighteenth century despite state efforts to contain it—and what he sees as the failure to control piracy. Smuggling and piracy, he argues, were “sister industries,” since both relied on the sale of illegally obtained goods, and both enjoyed some measure of popular support and legitimacy within the communities that spawned them. The analogy breaks down, however, if we accept the view of privateering as a form of piracy, for while governments did attempt to suppress both piracy and smuggling, they licensed and encouraged privateering for the simple reason that it supplemented their naval forces and enriched the nation at the expense of the enemy.

The nebulous boundary between piracy and privateering is certainly worthy of further study. During the “Golden Age” of piracy in the late seventeenth century, as many authors have acknowledged, it was often porous and murky, and it is clear that eighteenth century privateers sometimes overstepped the terms of their commissions and even turned pirate. Chet does us a service by bringing this issue into the spotlight, and provides sufficient anecdotal evidence to show that the distinction between privateering and piracy was not as clean as is sometimes assumed. He goes much too far, however, in asserting that the distinction was meaningless.