Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic world by Kevin P. McDonald (review)

Kevin McDonald’s revised UC Santa Cruz dissertation focuses on the networks that were formed in the late seventeenth century by pirates and traders who sailed halfway around the globe and connected the English colonies in North America, particularly New York, with Madagascar. This book deals with American-based merchants, Atlantic sailors and East African slaves, but rather than treating these groups separately, the author ties their stories together and develops the concept of an Indo-Atlantic World.

The chapter of history that McDonald presents is fascinating. After the suppression of buccaneering in the Caribbean in the 1680s several crews left the region and sought new targets, which they eventually found in the Arabian Sea. Madagascar emerged as an entrepôt for loot that was exchanged for supplies and liquor. Within the span of a few years in the 1690s about 1,500 pirates sailed to this island at the periphery of imperial expansion and participated in raids. However, only a few managed to strike it rich. Many soon sought alternative sources of income and became involved in the slave trade as well as auxiliary businesses. McDonald illustrates how this complex trade and exchange network at the fringe of the then-known world evolved and how participants did their best to thrive and survive, including a free African sailor. The examples of people operating at the intersection of piracy and long-distance trade give the reader an insight into the different faces of merchant capitalism in the first age of globalization.

Madagascar and its overseas connections certainly present interesting stories, but some scholars working in this field may ask themselves why this book was actually published. Almost everything that McDonald writes about has been dealt with by other historians. Robert C. Ritchie’s book about Captain Kidd covers by and large the same ground and leaves little else to be desired. René Barendse’s work on the Arabian Sea is exhaustive, Alison Games has established connections between Barbados and English colonizing schemes in Madagascar, Richard Allen has examined the Indian Ocean slave trade, and Jeffrey Bolster as well as Michael Jarvis have recovered the stories of Black sailors in the age of sail. Furthermore, there is an enormous body of French publications on Madagascar as well as the larger oceanic region that the author has not used.

Then there is the problem of sources. Most pirates and traders who sailed to Madagascar in the late seventeenth century may have been from the English colonial empire, but they operated in an environment that was profoundly international. Nearly all merchants based in New York were of Dutch origin, their ship crews included Germans and Frenchmen as well as sailors from other nations, and in Madagascar they dealt with a variety of different ethnic groups. The nearest imperial outposts were the French island Bourbon, modern La Réunion, the Dutch Cape Colony, and the Portuguese ports in Mozambique and Mombasa. All these colonies, along with the Arabs on the Swahili Coast, generated an impressive body of sources that survives in various archives. Can’t the readership of an academic book that claims to contribute to global history expect to make use of at least some of these records?

For the professional historian McDonald’s work may have little new to offer, but for the general audience this account of the Indo-Atlantic World certainly provides interesting perspectives. The book is well written and tells a captivating story without alienating non-academic readers with specialized jargon and theoretical considerations. One hopes that it will attract a large readership.