Scholarship on the peripheral localities of empire has recently come into vogue with the rise in popularity of borderland and frontier studies. While historians have long recognised maritime piracy as developing within spaces removed from the gaze of imperial officials and their regulations, there is a growing awareness of how critical illicit activities were to fledgling colonial settlements. Kevin McDonald’s monograph brings these issues together in an exploration of the interconnections between peripheral places of the early-modern British Empire—New York and Madagascar—through examining networks established and maintained by pirates.
At first glance, it seems that the book’s relatively small size of only 130 pages of written content is too little to accommodate all that Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves sets out to cover. However, McDonald shows that these were interrelated and overlapping categories, many of which were embodied by the same individuals. Pirates, supported by merchant financiers, created settler outposts in Madagascar. These were built and sustained with slave labour, from which raids were staged against both maritime and land-based enemies. Profits, goods, and people accumulated through these illicit activities then found their way back to New York and other colonies in the Atlantic. This process reveals a story of how connections between distant outposts of empire operated to subvert the structures of colonial economies, which were legally controlled by companies with monopoly rights in trade, such as the East India Company. McDonald’s book is thus an influential contribution to world history demonstrating how European imperial expansion also took place through unofficial, and even illicit means, an issue that has been understudied by historians.
McDonald uses his first chapter to address the perennial question of who is a pirate and what constitutes piracy. He postulates that piracy is best seen as a spectrum, ranging from “hardcore pirates, or lifers” to those who may have committed only one illegal act (15). While this may be too broad for some who prefer to see pirates only as early-modern anti-capitalist revolutionaries, McDonald further defends his position in the following chapter by demonstrating how colonial settlements, like New York, were reliant upon illicit activity for imports since legal trade was both more expensive and unreliable. Private individuals and officials in these towns actively supported voyages to the Indian Ocean and made New York a friendly port of call for vessels returning from the East with their illicit cargos. Since the East India Company had a royal trade monopoly with ports in the Indian Ocean littoral, any privately financed Anglo-American voyage to the East was illegal at its very outset. With Asian ports off-limits to pirates, they obtained their goods by raiding against the weaker-armed vessels of Arab and Indian merchants, and the shipping of Britain’s European enemies.
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with Madagascar’s place within the British imperial imagination. McDonald describes how there were several attempts over the seventeenth century to garner support for founding a British settlement there, and how the one official colony established on the island collapsed in failure. However, pirates had better luck. New York merchants backed a successful settlement on the eastern coast, creating a base that thrived for years, inhabited exclusively by pirates and local Malagasy allies. From this base and other unofficial locales, Atlantic pirates would wait out the hurricane season preying on Indian Ocean shipping. The Madagascar bases also provided a source of slaves, which they raided for, often in cooperation with local polities. This fact further complicates the romanticised image of “Golden Age” pirates as being democratic revolutionaries. Some may have been, but pirates were also responsible for the first slave imports to the Indian Ocean sugar islands and the colonies that became the United States. They also used Malagasy slaves to build their settlements and likely sold some of their Malagasy inhabitants into slavery (89).
The final chapter turns attention to the issue of slavery itself. Here McDonald offers anecdotes that illustrate the myriad roles slaves occupied within the New York-Malagasy pirate nexus. He uses the experience of a runaway slave-turned pirate and his powerful New York owner’s attempts to re-capture him, as demonstrative of how the connections between these outposts of empire extended even to legal-juridical matters. While McDonald attempts to be delicate in dealing with the issue of the slavery, he also feels the need to contextualise and historicise slave-owners by writing that they “must be also understood in their historical and social contexts”. He continues stating that one prominent New York merchant was “far from alone in owning slaves” and that his “attitudes and behaviour regarding slaves and slavery were liberal” (114). While this may be true, it comes across as rather apologetic and unnecessary within the framework of the book. A further stumble in the analysis of slavery is in posing the question: “Why there was no sense of kinship” among enslaved African supervisors (gromettos) from one part of the continent and their charges, who were slaves from ethnolinguistic groups in distant parts of Africa (115). The author’s query seems to suggest that Africans should share a natural affinity based solely on their African-ness or Blackness. It serves only to read European conceptions of race into an African context that does not necessarily exist today and certainly did not around the turn of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, McDonald does offer an insightful analysis that reconfigures the way slavery and piracy were intertwined.
The above criticisms should not detract from the book’s overall value and indeed offer exciting points for discussion in the classroom. There is indeed much to recommend in McDonald’s book. Foremost is the development of his conceptual framework and analytic category of the “Indo-Atlantic world”, which brings both oceans and their littorals into the same analysis. He persuasively demonstrates how actors and interests in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which too often get treated as separate worlds, forged the early-modern European empire. In doing so, he shows how pressures from influential chartered corporations could exert influence on imperial authorities to exercise control over governors in distant places who acted against their interests. It serves as a call to not only examine the relationships between the metropole and colonies more closely but also inter-colony and trans-imperial connections.
Scholars of world and global history, the early modern world, and the colonial Americas will find much of interest in McDonald’s book. For use in classes on imperial and trans-national history, students will find the book and its arguments easily digestible. The number of vignettes and anecdotes that frame the narratives of each chapter make for a compelling read, and thus would be a welcome inclusion to the reading lists of courses on imperial and trans-national history and the British Empire.
