ENEMY OF ALL MANKIND

The logo of modern capitalism isn’t properly the dollar sign but instead the skull and crossbones.

Wide-ranging as always, Johnson, author of such bestsellers as Everything Bad Is Good for You and How We Got to Now, locates the origins of our current dog-eat-dog economic condition in the actions of a flotilla of 17th-century pirates. Led by a mutineer named Henry Every, six ships converged at the mouth of the Red Sea, just where modern pirates gather today, to raid the fleets of the declining Mughal Empire. They attacked one huge ship that had the misfortune of having a cannon misfire even as a lucky shot from the pirate fleet took down the main mast. Aboard was a fortune in diamonds—and a harem that the pirates, as might be expected, treated as their own. The attack set in motion a number of things. For one, the British East India Company, sensing weakness, moved to secure a foothold in India while thwarting Parliament’s regulatory efforts to weaken the power of that early corporation. For its part, the British government declared Every and company to be enemies of mankind to be killed upon sight. Every disappeared, but some of his shipmates were not so fortunate. Johnson writes with vigor and evident fascination for Every and his exploits—that foundational mutiny, for instance, “one of those rare moments from history where we can re-create an almost second-by-second account of the actions.” His equation of their “radical dream of economic and political liberation” with the behavior of modern moguldom is arguable, but the predatory, sociopathic nature of the pirates is surely not. This makes it ever stranger that Every, now almost unknown, should have been a rock star in his day, and especially in a media-innocent time when brigands such as Walter Ralegh and Edward Teach commanded much public notice.

As with all of Johnson’s work, a highly readable, deeply researched look into a little-explored corner of history.