Free The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism by Rodolphe Durand, Jean-Philippe Vergne Page B

Portuguese Crown wanted to capitalize on new trade opportunities that were opened up to the east by Vasco da Gama. To do this, the Portuguese Crown granted a royal charter to Carreira da India, a trade organization, giving it the exclusive right to import spices into Europe. 1
    It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that other European powers entered into the race to set up a monopoly with the support of the Indies companies. This is how, in 1602, the United Provinces granted the VOC a twenty-one-year monopoly on trade with the regions lying east of the Cape of Good Hope. For many historians, the VOC remains the archetype for the “merging of sovereignty and trade monopoly—that is to say the strict integration of the political, military and market sectors.” 2 Monopolies are a very powerful force of normalization in the modern age. These large corporations employ tens of thousands of employees whose mission is to conquer new territories. Historically, the flow of people—soldiers and merchants—who came out of this new form of organization were controlled through a series of norms of unprecedented complexity: international laws for managing trade conflicts, fiscal treatises for charging a surplus, administrative norms for company governance, accounting standards for circulating assets, rules for training troops and guidelines for combat, rules of behavior for encounters with aboriginal populations, stock market directives for financing the development of large corporations, and even rules for recruiting sailors.
    Most of the norms governing monopolistic trade were a novelty at the time, as were most of the institutions that facilitated their use. The opening of the Amsterdam Stock Market in 1611, the founding of the Siegen military academy in 1616, and the use of risk calculations by insurance companies are just a few obvious examples. For almost two hundred years, large European monopolies would continue to dominate international trade by following these same principles.
    The common view of capitalism now is that it is essentially based on free competition. But is it? From the seventeenth century on, monopolies have been the rule, and free trade has usually been the exception. When historians analyze the modern era in comparison with other eras, they conclude that the (relative) freedom of trade has had a long history, and that trade regulations established by the modern state were the true innovation. 3 In any event, at the beginning of the capitalist era, monopolies and other sovereign privileges spearheaded the globalization of flows. They constitute the terrain from which capitalism evolves.
    Christopher Hill rightly observes that “pirates exterminate those who bought privileges from a State.” 4 In fact, pirates seem to defend the right to venture off on their own, to follow their own standards, and to benefit from the profits. In the modern age, the monopoly was a privilege that excluded private initiatives. This led to the quick ruin of well-established merchants and consequently gave rise to two phenomena: some companies stood up against monopolies by establishing a parallel and illicit trade route, and some tried to violently take over part of the flows from a monopoly. From the perspective of the sovereign state, both types of response were considered piracy. The growth of the pirate organization in the seventeenth century therefore cannot be separated from the normalization process of world trade carried out by the sovereign states.
    Analog Revolution, Pirate Radio Stations, and the Monopoly of the BBC
     
    Between the early 1920s and the late 1960s, the BBC defended its monopoly, claiming that other stations created interference on BBC airwaves. By claiming interference, the BBC also rationalized prohibiting foreign stations from broadcasting into British territory. AT&T made similar arguments in the United States when it claimed a commercial monopoly over transmissions received using