Follow the Code: Pirate Articles between Myth and History

Abstract

One of the most enduring ideas associated with the history of piracy is the “pirate code”, a set of coherent rules unique to pirates, supposed to bind nefarious plunderers together in a criminal community defined, perhaps surprisingly, by liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is an idea with its own history, emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called “golden age of piracy”), and casting a long shadow in subsequent popular culture. It will be known to aficionados of pirate films and computer games, and has drawn much attention among historical scholars too. Yet this idea is both an oversimplification and an exaggeration, ridiculing pirates in their own time and ever since, obscuring the much more complex social history of early modern plunderers.