Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader (review)

This book is an old-fashioned history, reflecting both the strengths and weaknesses that such a characterization might suggest. Kelsey's exhaustive research in multiple languages and in archives as far-flung as Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Spain, Mexico, and the United States has permitted him to situate Hawkins squarely within a complex web of international machinations. The biography's detailed narrative and its frequent inclusion of lengthy primary sources—some as long as three pages—within the text immerses readers in the intricacies of Elizabethan diplomacy and politics.

In an era of shifting alliances and enmities, Hawkins navigated the treacherous Anglo-Spanish rivalry with considerable skill. Kelsey is particularly adept at depicting a world in which "loyalties, whether national or personal, could change rapidly and then change back again" (141). Those with moral, political, and religious flexibility were best positioned to profit from this climate, and everything in Hawkins' family culture—maritime, violent, pragmatic, and opportunistic—prepared him for this historical moment. Despite Hawkins' pursuit of personal goals, his exploits were subsequently employed by a number of writers who sought to promote English ventures and nationalist or imperialist ambitions. Although Hawkins' name has become associated with English expansion and with the emergence of Elizabethan interests around the world, particularly in the Atlantic, Hawkins did not envision himself as bound to a single nation or to a single master so much as to his own interests. Kelsey has admirably restored Hawkins to a context that he might have recognized.

The biography's main weakness is its lack of active engagement with recent scholarship on the slave trade and on the social and cultural history of early modern England. Some readers might neither notice nor care about this absence, but scholars likely will. Too many tantalizing episodes lie unexplained, such as a description of ritual cannibalism in the wake of battle in Africa (66), or the remarkable deaths suffered by some of Hawkins' famished crew through overeating (97). Most troubling is the treatment of the slave trade. The subtitle of this book (Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader) may have been a marketing decision, since the balance of the book focuses on other aspects of Hawkins' interesting and varied career.

Kelsey is at his strongest when delineating the morass of European politics that Hawkins navigated. His depiction of Hawkins' career as treasurer of the navy is particularly effective. Europeans are identified painstakingly in this book by name and nationality. Those unfortunate men and women captured or purchased by Hawkins in Africa, however, are simply called "Africans" or "blacks." The comparison with the attention lavished on European mariners is stark. Kelsey laboriously pieces together the fates of the 370 men who were part of Hawkins' fleet in 1568, but he makes no similar investment in the captives that Hawkins transported, nor on the ordeal awaiting them in the Spanish Indies. Because Kelsey provides little context for the slave trade itself in this period, it is difficult to determine how typical Hawkins' multiple strategies of raid, theft, alliance, and trade were. Moreover, Hawkins' career as a trader came to an end in 1570. How did his trading activities affect subsequent English slavers? For all the depth of its archival base, the book might fail to satisfy specialists.