What 18th-Century Pirates Can Teach Modern Organizations

What if the outlaws of the Golden Age had solved, 300 years ago, the very problems driving your best talent away today?

In 1721, aboard the Royal Fortune, Bartholomew Roberts — known as Black Bart — captured his 400th ship. The most prolific pirate in history wasn't just feared for his boldness. He was followed, loyally, by hundreds of men willing to risk the gallows alongside him.

Why? Not just for the adventure. But because, aboard his ship, the rules of the game were clear, fair, and known to everyone before they ever left port.

What Roberts understood — and what many organizations still struggle to apply — comes down to three principles worth examining closely.

1. Compensation Is Not a Secret. It's a Contract.

On royal navy ships and merchant vessels of the 18th century, the captain decided everything alone: who got paid, how much, and when. Arbitrariness was the norm. Resentment, its inevitable consequence.

Pirates flipped the model entirely.

Before every expedition, the crew collectively drafted and signed their Articles of Agreement — a document that spelled out, in black and white, exactly how the spoils would be divided. No surprises at the end. No backroom favoritism. Every role had a defined share: the captain received between 1.5 and 2 shares, officers 1.25, the rest of the crew 1 share each. Maximum ratio: a factor of 2.

The founding principle was four words long: No prey, no pay. Compensation was entirely tied to collective performance. Everyone won together — or earned nothing together.

What this means for organizations today:

Pay transparency isn't a threat. It's an engagement lever. When everyone understands the logic behind how they're compensated, the feeling of injustice disappears — or at least becomes addressable. Opacity doesn't protect the organization: it fuels suspicion and destroys trust far more effectively than any pay gap ever could.

2. Equity Doesn't Mean Equality: Reward Real Contribution

A common misunderstanding: confusing equity with strict equality. Pirates didn't fall into that trap.

Their compensation grid was differentiated — but based on criteria that were objective and accepted by all: responsibility taken, skills brought, risk assumed. The ship's surgeon, whose hands saved lives in combat, received specific compensation. The carpenter, who kept the vessel seaworthy, too. Compensation was merit-based, not uniform.

Even more striking: pirates invented a form of collective social protection. Every code included precise compensation for injuries sustained in service — fixed amounts, drawn from a common pool funded by a portion of the plunder. Before the welfare state, before private insurance, these "outlaws" had understood that protecting individuals against collective risk strengthened everyone's commitment.

What this means for organizations today:

Fair compensation means aligning reward with real contribution — not applying the same rule to everyone regardless of context, nor maintaining unjustifiable gaps in the name of abstract hierarchy.

This raises a direct question: in your organization, are the criteria for compensation known, understood, and accepted as legitimate by those they affect? If the answer is no — or "it depends" — you have a source of silent disengagement that no ping-pong table or team happy hour will fix.

3. Authority Is Earned Through Consent, Not Granted by Title

Black Bart was captain. But his authority was not absolute.

The crew elected the captain — and could depose him. Alongside him, an independently elected quartermaster represented the crew's interests, distributed the spoils, and mediated disputes. The captain couldn't make any significant decision without the quartermaster's approval.

This system of checks and balances wasn't a drag on efficiency. It was its foundation. In battle, the captain had total authority — the situation demanded it. In peacetime, major decisions were put to collective vote: which target to pursue, which route to take, when to return.

Contextual authority. Structural counterbalance. Collective decision-making on strategic matters.

What this means for organizations today:

Leadership isn't decreed from an org chart. It's earned — and sustained — through the legitimacy granted by those who follow. The highest-performing teams aren't the ones where the manager decides everything: they're the ones where everyone knows exactly when they have a voice, and why.

Giving teams genuine input on decisions that affect them isn't a loss of control for leadership. It's what turns a group of individuals into a crew.

What We Do at CodHash

These principles haven't stayed on the shelf of history for us.

At CodHash, we're a collective of engineers and product architects, based between Lausanne and Paris. We build technical solutions — client mandates, proprietary SaaS products, mobile apps, blockchain and AI projects — but also, and perhaps most importantly, a way of working together.

Salary transparency, clear contribution criteria, collective decision-making on strategic direction: these aren't slogans printed on a wall. They're practices we iterate on, question, and improve over time — exactly the way we iterate on a product.

We don't claim to have it all figured out. But we believe these principles — the ones pirates empirically discovered 300 years ago — are among the most powerful levers for building a team that lasts and performs.

What Pirate History Is Really Telling Us

At a time when absolute monarchy and rigid hierarchy were the norm, men from the margins of society built — out of necessity as much as conviction — organizations grounded in transparency, equity, and consent.

They hadn't read Drucker. They hadn't done an MBA. But they had understood something essential: when the rules are fair and known to all, people fight for the common cause.

This isn't a history lesson. It's a mirror held up to today's organizations.

The question isn't "can we learn from pirates?" The question is: what's stopping you?

This article is part of an ongoing reflection on governance models and management practices that generate genuine belonging. Feel free to share your perspective in the comments.