The Past Speaks

E.H. Net has published Daniel Benjamin’s review of Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). For those interested in the golden age of piracy that followed the War of the Spanish Succession, this book is a must read. Moreover, the book is also topical because of the issue of Somali piracy. (see here).

My favourite sentence in the review is: “so perceptive were they on matters of governance that pirates might well be thought of as intellectual predecessors of the American Founding Fathers.”

You can watch the trailer for Leeson’s book here. The trailer is a bit corny, although it is perhaps unfair to expect academic presses to produce trailers as good as those for Hollywood films.