Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

Institutions like central governments or multinational corporations often seem as grand and formidable as the buildings they occupy. But the institutions themselves—and the power they wield—are invariably shaped by smaller conflagrations at their boundaries, defining the limits of their authority. Pirates occupied that role in the 1600s.

suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease, which this nation has deservedly so great a share in, and reaps such mighty advantage by.

That was the great promise of the pirate’s life: You could break free from the cycle of servitude and poverty. But you could only do it if the spoils were equitably shared.

In an age before tourism, pilgrimages introduced long-distance travel to millions of human beings who would otherwise have spent their entire lives on a much smaller patch of land.

Recent scholars have argued that the pirate crews that terrorized the West Indies were surprisingly multiracial in their composition, with Africans constituting more than 20 percent of the onboard population.

All these elements combined—an onboard democracy, with separation of powers; equitable compensation plans; insurance policies in the event of catastrophic injuries—meant that a pirate ship in the late 1600s and early 1700s operated both outside the law of European nation-states and, in a real sense, ahead of those laws. The pirates were vanguards a

Much like the investors in the East India Company, each pirate was considered a shareholder in the venture.

they committed most of those acts in international waters, where legal jurisdictions were by definition blurry. Declaring that pirates were “enemies of all mankind” gave local authorities on land the legal justification to try them for their crimes, even if those crimes had taken place on the other side of the world.

The core values of long-standing institutions are often first established by the founders and the visionaries that traditional histories foreground, for understandable reasons. But the ultimate structure of those organizations—the limits of their power, the channels through which they can express that power—are more often than not defined by edge c