Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves

Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World

Kevin P. McDonald

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780520282902
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520958784
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks.

Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.

Table of contents

• Cover
• PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Indo-Atlantic World
• 1. The Spectrum of Piracy
• 2. New York Merchants and the Indo-Atlantic Trade
• 3. Utopian Dreamers and Colonial Disasters
• 4. Pirate-Settlers of Madagascar
• 5. Seafaring Slaves and Freedom in the Indo-Atlantic World
• Conclusion: Specters of the Indo-Atlantic World
• Appendix 1. Slave Trade Ships in Madagascar, 1663–1747
• Appendix 2. Ships at Madagascar, 1689–1730
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index