Great Britain’s successful anti-piracy efforts of the early 1700s suggest what would be required to thwart Somali pirates: a set of enforceable legal carrots and sticks and a blue-water maritime capability to back them up operationally. In June 2008, the U.N. passed a resolution making it an international duty of member states to fight piracy and allowing them to pursue Somali pirates into Somalia’s territorial waters. But with the best navies preoccupied with other pressing tasks, sustaining a maritime presence large enough to deter or respond to an appreciable number of pirate attacks remains difficult. And even if all of the nations affected were to commit to standing patrols, their oversight of various sectors of the pirates’ operational space would have to be determined by a central command to maximize geographical coverage. That, in and of itself, is a fairly tall diplomatic order.

For all of the muscle supplied by Parliament to British anti-piracy laws starting in 1700, The Invisible Hook makes it clear that piracy could not be decisively squelched until the Crown, in 1717, dispatched naval forces to place under government control the pirates’ two most strategic land bases, in the Bahamas and Madagascar. This denial of access forced the bandits to scatter and rendered them more vulnerable. One comparable present-day solution might involve military intervention in Somalia. In light of Somalia’s wholesale security and state-building requirements, an open-ended deployment of tens of thousands of ground troops for peace-enforcement and civilian staff to build up civil infrastructure–on the order of Afghanistan–would be needed. Given the residual demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, though, major powers don’t have the military assets available to implement a coalition or U.N. peacekeeping operation, while African militaries can’t even meet existing needs in Sudan, southern Somalia, and elsewhere. The Americans’ distasteful experience in leading the humanitarian intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s, which culminated in the "Black Hawk Down" incident, would also give intervening forces pause. The international community therefore would have to leverage diplomacy, and engagement would have to be unprecedentedly energized and sustained.

That too, of course, is a daunting proposition, given Somalia’s sorry string of corrupt transitional governments. But Leeson makes the perceptive point that the predatory behavior of many rulers in sub-Saharan Africa discourages economic cooperation by destroying their citizens’ confidence that that they will share in the fruits of their labors. From this standpoint, the pirates’ entrepreneurial team spirit–even in a criminal enterprise–may indicate a gritty sensibility that could be harnessed to channel the country toward legitimate political and economic progress. In fact, relatively flat, egalitarian pirate governance, which the Somalis have apparently replicated to some extent today, is consistent with Somalia’s horizontal clan framework of social organization. To be sure, clan divisions can impede economic cooperation. But, in vindication of Leeson’s thesis, the profit motive has reportedly induced pirates to cross customarily divisive clan lines in doing business.

The lesson may be that outside brokers should be wary of imposing their will with a heavy hand, and let the lighter invisible hand (and hook) of Somali self-interest play out in non-violent negotiations. Allowing Somalis to fragment into mutually recognized clan-based quasi-states, like Somaliland and Puntland, before they arrive at a federal arrangement may be the most plausible solution. While such a disposition would clash with the UN’s preference for a unitary state in Somalia and make neighboring states leery of Somalia’s instability, it merits serious consideration–if only because nothing else has remotely worked.

Leeson casts his jaunty gem of a book as an especially vivid and sardonic illustration of "the ubiquity of economics" and its utility as a "filter" of history. As he says, "only with economics can we make sense of a great deal of otherwise unintelligible human behavior" (emphasis in original). True enough, but perhaps he is being too modest. For while his argument assuredly does bolster the Chicago School case that the dismal science pervades every human endeavor, it also shows that bad guys operate according to an internal logic that makes them all the more difficult to dislodge from their illicit vocation.

The Invisible Hook’s crowning truth is that pirates, within the parameters that define their world, act rationally. The same holds for terrorists, so it is never enough for their adversaries to dismiss them as cowards or lunatics. Indeed, as probing recent studies like Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism have implied, doing so is plain dumb. To quote the redoubtable Jack Sparrow: "Me I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly it’s the honest ones you have to watch out for, because you never can predict if they’re going to do something incredibly stupid."