More seriously, there’s a pattern you tend to see play out any time there’s a major war:
1. Everybody involved hires a bunch of soldiers. (Obviously.)
2. The war ends, and the big players get to thinking “you know, it would be a lot cheaper to just not pay any of those soldiers we hired to fight our war for us.”
3. So they don’t, leaving a whole bunch of large groups of well trained, heavily armed men stranded and broke wherever they happened to be when the war ended.
4. Fast forward ten years, and those same big player are going “where did all these bandits come from, and why are they kicking our asses?”
It’s a common enough trajectory that you can basically predict which periods in history will see a surge of outlawry that ends up getting romanticised in subsequent popular culture by looking for the war a decade earlier.
Pirates follow the same pattern. Though there have been several periods throughout history that have been called “the Age of Piracy”, the one that most directly informs the romantic image of the pirate in modern popular culture is the period from 1715-1725 – i.e., right on the tail of the War of the Spanish Succession, which wound down in 1714. And sure enough, a great many of the pirates who operated during that period were former privateers who’d been cheated of their pay and left to rot when the war ended, or else got their start in the piracy trade as members of an ex-privateer’s crew.
So when I say that pirates are the feral counterpart to the domesticated privateer, I’m only partly joking – that’s more or less literally how it happened!
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