Pirates and Postcolonialism

An internet oddity emerges: a graph showing a nearly perfect correlation between the decline in the number of pirates worldwide and the rise in global temperatures. 

If the pirates are considered as historical actors, then they were more than simple criminals. Dissenters in a world increasingly ordered by empire, pirate crews consisted of escaped slaves, rebels, and outsiders who built flotillas that defied European hierarchies. Pirate ships often practiced democratic voting and collective decision-making, creating spaces of subversive autonomy that contrasted the new age of order.

Serving as radical departures from European rigidity, pirates represented a brief but alternative modernity: one that resisted the plantation, the factory, and the crown.

However, soon enough, they vanished. Hunted down by imperial forces such as the British Navy, they were seen as threats not just to commerce, but to order. As pirate resistance slowed and trade routes were secured, the gates opened to surge the Industrial Revolution forward, powered by the desire for conquest and the need for colonial labor. The disappearance of pirates is not casually linked to climate change because they had magical thermostats on their ships, but because their erasure reflected the rise of unchecked imperialism and uncontrolled capitalism, the very engines of the Anthropocene. The last Golden Age of Piracy gave way to an unparalleled expansion of European colonial empires and exponential rise in transatlantic slavery.

This is not just a historical coincidence, but an ideological shift. The loss of pirates signified the loss of possible futures; the world became quieter and more compliant as steel mills, oil rigs, plantations, and railroads expanded. In fact, artists and intellectuals have started to transform the pirate, ship, and sea into symbols of resistance, reinforcing this idea. Édouard Glissant reclaimed the sea from a site of trauma during the Middle Passage into a passage for possibility and a place of historical importance to diasporic communities across the West. Hew Locke’s series of ship sculptures titled Odyssey, is adorned with colonial era symbols and sketches of enslaved Africans that serve as ghost vessels of empire and resistance, forcing confrontation to a history of plunder and exploitation. In their works, the pirate and their world becomes a radical symbol, a metaphor for rebellion and reclamation. The correlation of globally rising temperatures and the decline of pirates is an ultimately postcolonial phenomenon, with pirates becoming the symbols for liberation and resilience as artists explore identity, exile, and lost histories: the paths not taken. 

While it is a spurious correlation, the graph encompasses a kind of truthful tale. A world without pirates is the world we inherited; a world instead occupied by industrial certainty, colonial aftermath, and rising sea levels. If pirates were the last utopian rebels of the old world, their absence has helped make space for the concrete, carbon-heavy one we now live in. To remember the pirates, then, is not to romanticize plunder, but to remember that rebellion was once imaginable and perhaps could still be.