Both the captain and the quartermaster were popularly elected by the crew and could be readily deposed if they overstepped their narrowly circumscribed authority, creating a democratic check on pirate leadership.

Pirate ships were significantly more cooperative and orderly than their popular depiction, and this order was grounded in a system of early constitutional democracy with elected officers and a written code that functioned to keep the criminal enterprise together.

Pirates regulated drinking, smoking, and gambling not out of morality but because these behaviors generated severe negative externalities on a crowded, highly flammable wooden ship—smoking risked igniting gunpowder, and drinking and gambling could spark conflict among men crammed together for long periods.

Pirate cooperation was sustained by making contracts self-enforcing: because a broken-down criminal organization meant capture and hanging, every member had a powerful shared incentive to maintain cooperation, unlike the betrayal narratives of Hollywood thieves.

The written pirate constitution made the terms of distribution explicit—such as the captain's exact share—creating common knowledge so the crew could collectively observe and agree when a captain overstepped, coordinating their enforcement against predation by leadership.

The pirate constitution system likely evolved from the buccaneers (c.1630–1690), who were intermediate between privateers and pure pirates and had a less detailed, less thoroughly democratic 'chase party' system, which itself traces back to privateering ships' articles—showing carryover of Seaborne rules of order from legitimate society.

The added cost of writing down pirate rules was very small because, by the 1720s, anyone captured and suspected as a pirate was almost certain to be hanged regardless of whether the articles existed in writing.

Pirates were a motley multinational group, mostly only semi-literate (capable of signing their name, hence 'making their mark'), with the articles usually written in English because a large proportion of early-18th-century pirates were English; the quartermaster, likened to a Roman Tribune, helped relay the articles to crew members.

Pirate articles often included a clause requiring signatories to remain part of the crew until a certain sum had been earned, to prevent members from quitting early once they had made enough money or decided piracy wasn't for them.

Pirates enforced effort and discouraged shirking through positive incentives—bonus shares of booty for being first to spot a prize or for exceptional valor in battle—rather than through legal threats like court-martial, since they lacked formal legal institutions.

Pirates ran a system of workers' compensation that paid specified amounts in pieces of eight for the loss of particular body parts, with values reflecting each part's value in pirating, which both insured against injury and incentivized crew to give full effort in battle.

The quartermaster functioned as a separation of powers and ballast against the captain: the captain had unquestioned authority only in battle, while the quartermaster held most day-to-day power, was democratically elected, was checked by the crew on major decisions, and indirectly competed with the captain for the top office—so both played to ordinary crew members' interests.

The ultimate check against a tyrannical pirate captain was crew sentiment backed by the credible threat of a violent revolt, which—unlike on a merchant ship—carried no legal penalty since mutiny against a pirate captain was not a punishable crime, whereas a merchant crew's mutiny was punishable by death.

Because pirates carried weapons freely while merchant sailors' arms were often locked away, the non-monopoly on force among the crew acted as an important check on the captain's tyranny—analogous to the Second Amendment's logic that distributed force checks sovereign power.

The very illegality of piracy was responsible for desirable features of their system: by removing the legal penalty for mutiny, it destroyed the captain's opportunism, and by depriving pirates of external financiers (forcing them to steal ships), it eliminated the principal-agent problem that made merchant ships adopt autocratic captains, allowing pirates to organize as a seagoing workers' co-op.

The success of the workers' co-op model on pirate ships does not imply legitimate businesses should be organized that way; the correct solution to principal-agent problems differs case by case, and profit-oriented firms resolve them to the point where marginal cost equals marginal benefit using methods suited to their circumstances—Walmart's stock options being one such method to reduce free-riding.

A great pirate leader could extract some rents from his crew because crew members would willingly sacrifice autonomy or accept a lower expected return to be allied with a superior strategist who raised their chances of success—illustrated by Blackbeard shooting a crew member in the kneecaps to remind everyone what he was capable of.

Shirking on a pirate ship is subtler than on a barge: where the barge task is straightforward (pull hard, constant maximum effort), pirate work requires wise rather than unrelenting effort, so crews wanted a thoughtful captain rather than one simply driving everyone forward under the lash.

The Jolly Roger functioned as a signaling device to communicate that an attacking ship was an unconstrained outlaw pirate rather than a legally-restricted coast guard vessel, which mattered because pirates—being outlaws—could brutally retaliate against resisting merchant ships while coast guards (and privateers) were legally restrained from doing so.

Pirates wanted to avoid violent battles because resistance damaged their stolen ship, killed crew, and could destroy or sink the prize and its cargo—all of which hurt their bottom line—so nearly everything pirates did was directed at getting merchant ships to surrender peaceably.

The Jolly Roger was an effective signal because flying it was cheap for pirates (already outlaws) but extremely costly for coast guard ships, which would step outside legal bounds and become subject to being hunted and hanged as pirates—so coast guards refrained from using it, preserving the flag's meaning.

Around 1721 the British government passed a law subjecting armed merchant crews to prison and wage forfeiture if they failed to defend against pirate attack, which is evidence both that merchant ships were overwhelmingly surrendering and that the pirates' Jolly Roger strategy was highly effective.

The harder pirate promise to keep was the threat to brutalize resisters (costly to carry out) rather than the promise of mercy to those who surrender (which is not costly); for the average money-motivated pirate, sparing peaceful captives was the natural, low-cost choice.

There is no evidence that pirates were more sadistic, brutal, democratic, or rule-following than ordinary people; they were simply rationally self-interested economic actors, and their distinctive and entertaining behaviors are the result of rational self-interest in their particular context—we should reject 'pirate exceptionalism.'

Pirates overcame the free-rider problem of the reputational benefit of mercy (which otherwise mainly helps the next crew) through captain- and crew-specific reputations and distinctive Jolly Roger designs, allowing them to internalize the benefit; Blackbeard's reputation was so effective that, per the leading historian, he apparently never actually killed anyone.

Pirates kept their word and released cooperative captives alive precisely because 'dead men tell no tales' worked against them—they wanted survivors to spread word of how scary pirates were and how well surrender was treated, which made future merchant crews surrender more easily.

Pirates deserve qualified admiration because, while all thieves should be condemned, some give the world something back—pirates demonstrated the effectiveness of self-governance and experimented with checks and balances, separated powers, and constitutional democracy more than half a century before Madison and before the English Bill of Rights, and their doing so as violent outlaws shows the robustness of these forms of social organization.

Pirate self-interest generated conditional social benefits including racial tolerance: at a time when black slaves were brutally treated in the legitimate world, pirates in many cases granted them freedom with equal pay and equal suffrage—not from racial enlightenment but because enslaving fellow crew often cost more than it was worth, bolstering the bottom line.

Governance—a system of privately created rules and means of enforcement—can emerge without government; a punishment one voluntarily agreed to ex ante (even violent punishment by a third party like the quartermaster) is governance rather than coercion, distinguishing voluntary self-governance from a non-contractual 'social contract.'

Knowledge of pirate practices comes mainly from two books—Exquemelin's buccaneer chronicle and Captain Charles Johnson's 1724/1728 General History of the Pyrates—corroborated by Colonial Office archival papers, trial records, and early-18th-century newspapers, with pirate constitutions appearing nearly verbatim in both Johnson and newspaper accounts, making the relied-upon portions well corroborated.

Early Somali pirates were uninteresting from a governance standpoint because their 'six guys in a skiff' in-and-out ransom operations did not form floating societies, but as their population grew and they spent extended time together at land bases, a new pirate society with private law, rules on inter-pirate theft and prisoner treatment, and a mobile court emerged—because the cells are connected yet geographically separated.

Modern Somali pirates behave as rational economic actors: of 815 hostages taken in a recent year, none were intentionally killed (four died apparently accidentally) and only two were injured—under half of 1%—not from niceness but because dead or injured prisoners do not fetch a ransom, so it is better to be captured by a greedy pirate than one who doesn't care about money.

Our popular image of pirates is schizophrenic—we hold both the idea of disorderly criminal rogues and the idea of a 'pirate's code.'

Pirates spent an inordinate amount of time drinking, and crews likely formed in taverns or brothels on New Providence island because there was little else in commerce in those days.