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Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it’s time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates’ notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a \"pirate code\"? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits. The Invisible Hook looks at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how pirates’ search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices. Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy--a model they adopted more than fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers’ compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality. Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice--their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order. Pirates proved that anarchy could be organized.

In this essay, Andrea McKenzie argues that the scatological and bawdy humor for which early eighteenth-century highwayman lives were so notorious functioned as a particularly pungent form of social and political commentary. The invocation of both blackguard protagonists and authors reinforced the element of social shaming and inversion, while the common trope of the “biting the biter” (implying that it is no crime to con, outwit, or despoil those who prey on others) was readily adaptable to a Tory or “Country” satirical program. She also aims to shed new light on an old and vexed question: to what degree were representations of social inversion normative or subversive?

OCTOBER 1838 (pg. 310-301). NOVEMBER 1838 (pg. 310-301). DECEMBER 1838 (pg. 310-313). JANUARY (pg. 313-322). FEBRUARY (pg. 322-328). MARCH (pg. 328-331). APRIL (pg. 331-337). MAY (pg. 337-343). JUNE (pg. 343-349). JULY (pg. 350-357). AUGUST (pg. 357-362). SEPTEMBER (pg. 362-367). OCTOBER (pg. 367-371). NOVEMBER (pg. 371-374). DECEMBER (pg. 374-381).