In Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean films, the villain is no surprise. The East India Trading Company, a stand-in for the real East India companies that dominated global trade, wants to control the seas and hang anyone who gets in the way. Pirates, by simply trading and sailing outside its monopoly, are outlaws.
Watch closely, though, and the films take some odd shots at the world of work. In The Curse of the Black Pearl, young Will Turner is a blacksmith’s apprentice who does all the skilled work while his boss drinks and takes the credit. When the pirate Jack Sparrow turns up, Will fights him for minutes, only for the boss to wake up and claim the capture. It plays like a joke about a guild system that rewards seniority over talent.
The pirate code
The films also make much of “the Code,” the pirates’ rules, which turn out to be “more what you’d call guidelines.” The real history is more interesting. Many pirate crews in the late 1600s and early 1700s did sail under written articles that every crew member signed. They set out how loot was shared, often with the captain getting only one and a half or two shares to an ordinary sailor’s one, and how crews elected and could remove their captains.
Some articles even included a kind of injury insurance, setting payments for the loss of an arm, a leg or an eye. Historian Marcus Rediker and economist Peter Leeson have both argued that these crews were, in their way, more democratic than the merchant and naval ships many pirates had escaped, where captains had near-absolute power and pay was low.
So which side are they on?
The films are not really making a case for or against unions. They borrow the romance of freedom from rigid hierarchies, which is part of why pirates have appealed for three centuries. But if the real pirate articles were anything, they were a crude collective agreement: equal shares, elected bosses and compensation for injuries at work. That sounds less like hatred of organized labor and more like an early version of it.
Sources: Pirate code, Wikipedia; Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Wikipedia; The Invisible Hook (Peter T. Leeson), Wikipedia; Marcus Rediker.
