Private Warfare in the Age of Sail

Abstract

Modern naval warfare is the exclusive province of government. Until relatively recently, however, governments tolerated — even encouraged — private sector participation in maritime hostilities. Naval and merchant vessels were not strongly differentiated from one another, and neither type of vessel was well suited to all-weather, year-round duty at sea. When combined with rudimentary (and relatively costly) systems of taxation, this gave monarchs an incentive to focus their naval ventures during good weather months and to rely on merchant ships as important supplements to the Crown’s navy. Thus, until the eighteenth century, privately owned and operated merchant vessels were used as men-of-war, and they served in the war on enemy trade into the nineteenth century. We seek to explain the observed variation in the key contractual provisions of privateer contracts by examining over 60 contracts from the period 1744 to 1807, gathered from the files of the Public Record Office in London. We suggest reasons for many of the general patterns seen in the contracts; notably, we believe we have a remarkably simple yet powerful explanation for the enormous variation observed in the distribution of the prizes between the owners and crew. We also provide a clearer picture of the variation in the distribution of prize shares among crew members, using measures of inequality to compare different privateers’ allotments. Most importantly, we have developed a method of using contractual provisions to infer the expectations of privateers regarding the prizes they were likely to capture. We are then able to use these estimates to infer expected total earnings of seafarers at all levels of the chain of command. One implication of these estimates is that crew serving on privateers could expect to earn substantially more than men serving on merchant ships. For able seamen the privateering premium was at least fifty percent; for higher ranks it likely was even greater.