OK, so I may have lied. My exploration of oceanic tomes has more to do with piracy than anything else, because I'm working hard this week and need something easily digestible. This book certainly did not do that for me, as it's a historic treatise on piracy from the days of antiquity to the Somali and Southeast-Asian contemporary that I'm sick of by now.
The book opens with Pompey's put-down of piracy in the Mediterranean, which apparently took only a few months. This chapter explains that true elimination of the negative externality that is piracy is quite simple. However, in the Westphalian system of competitive states, it often makes more sense to bleed out your enemies rather than fix a societal problem.
This bleeds over into the next chapters on Viking and Barbary raiders, who both succeeded in playing coastal powers against each other to ensure their career of plunder, which happened to be a part-time affair for most men. Then the book goes into Southeast Asian piracy in the 18-19 centuries, where they were treated much more as a business consortium than a pest or a state.
The end of the book goes into the modern Malay and Somali piracy which goes into the oft-trodden subjects of international law, jurisdiction, motivation and means of piracy in the 21st century. For making me understand much more about the piratus economicus, I strongly suggest the read.
9/10