Pirate Booty
All that pirate action in Somalia has created a booming “stock market” of sorts. Foreign Policy thinks this might help shine a necessary spotlight on the Big Fish behind all the hostage-taking. Elsewhere, these masterminds are referred to as “a few deep-pocketed financiers.” And who would they be?
Interesting stuff, especially in how it further shows the parallels between Somali piracy today and early modern piracy, which in the seventeenth century was financed to a considerable degree by the elites of colonial port towns (mostly in the Caribbean but also including, e.g., New York). One of the ways that pirate problem was solved was by European governments taking a harder line on what their colonial subjects were up to, which dried up one of the pirates’ main sources of funding and forced them into becoming true outlaws by the early eighteenth century, which made it easier for European navies to go after them.