https://archive.ph/QOtSA https://archive.ph/QOtSA From the article: It helps to think of piracy as a phase in early modern venture capitalism. That's the argu

https://archive.ph/QOtSA https://archive.ph/QOtSA From the article: It helps to think of piracy as a phase in early modern venture capitalism. That's the argument persuasively made by the economic historian Nuala Zahedieh, who studies the English Caribbean. Sugar planters there envisaged large profits but had to make serious investments - buying enslaved people, clearing land, building roads and harbors - before realizing them. Backers in London were understandably wary. The most "hopeful" economic foundation for Jamaica, one of its governors believed, was thus raiding. It was an "ideal start-up trade," Zahedieh agrees, in that it required only a small initial outlay - especially small because pirates worked for shares rather than for wages. Piracy was dangerous, but it generated the quick cash needed to launch plantations. Theft on the seas thus helped to establish more reliable forms of plunder: of Native land and African labor.