Before governments legislated workplace safety and before trade unions fought for injury benefits, a group of outlaws operating beyond the reach of any law had already solved the problem. Seventeenth-century pirates — romanticised in fiction as bloodthirsty anarchists — had written, signed, and enforced some of the most sophisticated injury compensation schemes the Atlantic world had ever seen. A sailor who lost his right arm in a raid could claim the equivalent of six years' wages from a...
