Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (review)

Adroitly blending the vast scope of historical geography with the contextualized specificity of individual biography, Ogborn brings to life Britain's central role in the creation of the early modern global world. He eschews interpretive models based on such grand narratives as the rise of the West, or on such single economic explanations as the rise of capitalism, and he is not concerned with the political or administrative history of the British Empire. Instead, Ogborn employs a model of multiple webs or networks, tracing the patterns of engagement with the world that brought power and profit to some and oppression and exploitation to others. He views global history as made up of a variety of different processes, increasingly integrated by multiple forms of mental and manual labor, and contested through wars fought with weapons and ideas. The processes of trade, empire, labor, and exploration are illustrated by the activities of forty-two individuals who helped to create the New World. Merchants, explorers, captives, slave traders, enslaved Africans, indigenous intermediaries, brokers, sailors, landscape painters, plantation owners, pirates, and rebels, from the well known to the obscure, populate the pages.

Ogborn surveys the fragile beginnings of empire under Elizabeth: the often violent and savage European settlement of North America; the financial precariousness of the Atlantic triangular trade; the blending of American land, African labor, and European capital and management to form Caribbean plantation society; the setting up of trade with Asia which, because it already had land-based empires, regarded the Europeans as just one more set of merchants; and the exploration, driven by the dual desires of empire and enlightenment, of the Pacific. This increasingly global world was forged by explorers and entrepreneurs and by muscle, cooperation, and resistance. Sailors unfurled sails, loaded and unloaded ships, and manned guns. Enslaved Africans torn from their homelands toiled in the sugar islands of Barbados and Jamaica. Local intermediaries were vital to the success of every British venture. African merchants and rulers skillfully negotiated their place in the new Atlantic economy, and cultural and economic brokers known as nharas opened the way for Europeans to engage with African networks. Empire building in Asia would not have been possible without the assistance of groups like the pandits in India. Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator, mediated between the British and Pacific islanders. Ogborn details the unforeseen effects that the expanded interaction had on different cultures, as well as the efforts of those who resisted British imperialism.

Global Lives skirts scholarly debates, supplying mainly a fluent synthesis of secondary sources for non-specialists. Ogborn's approach transforms the typical overarching, abstract narrative of global and imperial history into an investigation of human endeavor. Understanding global processes through the lens of biography highlights the role of human actions. Even with limited intentions, no overall plan, and uncertain outcomes, these human actions were crucial to the making of the New World. Greater nuance in the biographies would have been welcome, as would more of a focus on relationships. Ogborn offers lively descriptions of individuals and their world, but little analysis of what they thought and felt about the vast changes.