One of the more outlandish claims I make in the book is that America is a nation founded on piracy. Perhaps the most interesting proof of this lies in the origin of the word Yankee. The most likely source is the Dutch name Janke, which means “little Jan” or “little John,” a nickname that can be traced back to the 1680s, when it was used as a slang term for pirates.

English sailors were the first to apply the term to Dutch pirates in the Caribbean. Yankee Dutch (1683) was a noted noted Dutch pirate of the Spanish Main, as was Captain Yankey (1684), and Captain John Williams (nickname: Yankee) (1687). General James Wolfe, the British general who secured North America by defeating the French at Quebec in the 1750s, was the first to use it as a derogatory term for the New Englanders in his army.

Back when New York was known as New Amsterdam, the English began using the word as a derogatory term for all the Dutch settlers there. These same Dutch settlers later began using Yankee to refer to English settlers of Connecticut, because they saw their unfair trading practices as ‘piratical’ and unethical. The term was later used to refer to all New Englanders, and the first recorded use of the term by the British to refer to Americans in general appears in the 1780s, in a letter by Lord Horatio Nelson.

But the term really gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Europeans began using the term to refer to all North Americans as a result of America’s national policies towards European intellectual property. America only industrialized as rapidly as it did by counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents and stealing intellectual property wholesale. “Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle” writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. “The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize.” Europeans saw America as a nation of bootleggers, which was a little unfair, as every major European country was also heavily engaged in piracy and industrial espionage at some point in the 18th century. Piracy was, in fairness, the only way the U.S. could keep up.