ABSTRACT: Can criminal profit-seeking generate socially desirable outcomes? This article investigates this question by examining the economics of pirate tolerance. At a time when British merchant ships treated blacks as slaves, some pirate ships integrated black bondsmen into their crews as full-fledged and free members. This racial tolerance was not the product of enlightened notions of equality. Rather, it was forged in the self-interested context of the criminally-determined costs and benefits of pirate slavery. Analogous to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, whereby lawful commercial self-interest seeking can generate socially desirable outcomes, among pirates there was an “invisible hook,” whereby criminal self-interest seeking produced a socially desirable outcome in the form of racial tolerance.
