This is from the book: "Chapter 5 applies the economics of reputation building to pirates’ famous fondness for torture. Pirate victims were understandably relu

This is from the book: "Chapter 5 applies the economics of reputation building to pirates’ famous fondness for torture. Pirate victims were understandably reluctant to reveal booty to their attackers. Some victims even hid or destroyed their valuables. Such behavior threatened to reduce pirates’ revenue. To prevent this, pirates invested in reputations of barbarity and insanity, creating a fearsome “brand name.” Brutally torturing resistors was one important way they did this. But pirates used torture for other reasons too. One was to deter authorities from harassing them. The other was to bring justice to predatory merchant ship captains when government couldn’t or wouldn’t do so. In this last capacity, pirate torture may have contributed to the provision of an important public benefit for merchant sailors-the punishment of dishonest merchant captains, which stood to reduce merchant captain abuse. Chapter 6 considers the economics of pirate conscription. According to popular depiction, pirates swelled their ranks by drafting innocent and unwilling sailors from the vessels they overtook. This chapter shows that in many cases the supposed “pirate press” was nothing more than a clever pirate ruse. In response to eighteenth-century legal changes that made pirating riskier, pirates pretended to conscript sailors to exploit a loophole in antipiracy law. Like all good businessmen, pirates developed solutions, such as this one, to advance their interests when rising costs threatened to cut against them."