For British and American historians alike, pirates are the canaries of Europe's early modern expansion. Until the late seventeenth century, their unchecked freebooting is often used to highlight the extra-European weakness of Europe's colonial powers, on land as well as at sea. For the same reason, historians generally see the move to suppress piracy, notably during the British and French naval campaigns of the early 1720s, as heralding the triumph of a new, more efficient and centralized system of governance everywhere. In this slim but important book, Guy Chet shows that the second assumption, in particular, is mistaken. Rather than succumbing to the power of the state, pirates continued to be a constant and present danger throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. When their depredations finally did abate, writes Chet, the change owed nothing to naval power or the courts but was the result of the return of global peace in 1815 and the higher profit margins that seafarers could earn from legitimate trade.

This alone is a contentious argument and makes Chet's The Ocean is a Wilderness well worth reading, but his explanation for the persistence of sea marauding is, if anything, even more compelling. One of the great innovations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was the emergence of widely available maritime insurance. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the rates that brokers charged on long-distance voyages fell steadily and dramatically, in the process helping fuel an era of stunning economic expansion on all sides of the Atlantic. Historians have often taken this expansion as evidence of the success of the war against the pirates. As the risk of robbery on the high seas diminished, the argument goes, the price that brokers demanded for insuring seaborne cargo dropped as well. Against this view, Chet maintains that lower insurance premiums were the result, not of declining risk at sea, but of growing competition between insurers. More provocatively, he suggests that the growth of marine insurance was actually one of the reasons why piracy continued to be so profitable and common. Once they were protected against catastrophic loss, merchant ship captains had fewer incentives to take costly precautions against piracy like mounting cannons and sailing in convoy; their ships accordingly became easier to capture. Often, insurance also created opportunities for collusion, as pirates and merchants agreed to divide the monetary compensation for cargo that had been “lost,” and it allowed merchants to engage in their own occasional acts of piracy, knowing that any losses that they incurred would be fully covered. “The growth of a robust marine insurance market,” writes Chet, “enabled British and American merchants to draw profits from piracy and pirated goods while reducing piracy-related losses” (64).

The result is a thorough-going revision of what historians know—or thought they knew—about piracy and the early modern state. Not only did Britain's and Europe's other maritime empires lack the power or authority to end the scourge of piracy in the Atlantic (and presumably in the Indian and Pacific Oceans), but the commercial expansion of the eighteenth century, which historians often assume could not have occurred without the pirates’ defeat, turns out to have been one of the main reasons for their persistence. In other words, pirates were not primitive rebels or plebeians whose maritime livelihoods were threatened by the growth of international capitalism, as Marxist historians, in particular, have sometimes suggested (see, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Buford Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 2000). Nor, to reference the work of Max Weber and Albert Hirschman, was the ethos of the pirate all that different from the ethos of the merchant. Just as pirates benefited from the world of merchant capitalism, so too did merchants continue to engage in smuggling, clandestine trade, and armed depredation. With surprising frequency, merchants and pirates worked in overlapping occupations.

Some readers may question whether in pressing his argument, Chet misses some important qualifications. One is whether piracy, despite its remarkable persistence, was quite as unchanging as his analysis seems to suggest. In discussing the perceived difference between piracy and privateering, for example, Chet suggests, correctly, that historians have often been too quick to accept a “sharp distinction” between the two practices (27), yet that does not mean that the distinction was meaningless. One could argue that the widespread use and eventual acceptance of the term privateering—that is, the officially sanctioned taking of neutral and enemy vessels by private warships, which Chet writes was a “novel” concept in the eighteenth century (27)—was itself a sign of the growing ability of European states to regulate the activities of their subjects at sea, even if they could not entirely control what they did. As pirates began to take shelter under the label “privateer,” would not the character of piracy change too? Even though the early modern state's authority had to be negotiated with renegades and outlaws of all descriptions, including pirates, the negotiation was rarely a one-sided process.

If the state's authority was not quite as limited as his book's title appears to suggest, Chet is nonetheless right to insist on its underlying weakness. Indeed, because scholars have so often taken the other side of the question, along the way effacing pirates from the history of the eighteenth-century British Empire, there are good reasons to write a book that gives pride of place to their continued presence. By writing such a book, Guy Chet has made an important statement. For that alone, he deserves a wide readership.