From bondage to personhood: autobiographical discourses of freedom from Cuba and Brazil

The interactions of two like-signed vortices in viscous fluid are investigated using two-dimensional numerical simulations performed across a range of vortex strength ratios, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{1}/\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{2}\leqslant 1$, corresponding to vortices of circulation, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{i}$, with differing initial size and/or peak vorticity. In all cases, the vortices evolve by viscous diffusion before undergoing a primary convective interaction, which ultimately results in a single vortex. The post-interaction vortex is quantitatively evaluated in terms of an enhancement factor, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{end}/\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{2,start}$, which compares its circulation, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{end}$, to that of the stronger starting vortex, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{2,start}$. Results are effectively characterized by a mutuality parameter, $MP\equiv (S/\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})_{1}/(S/\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})_{2}$, where the ratio of induced strain rate, $S$, to peak vorticity, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$, for each vortex, $(S/\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})_{i}$, is found to have a critical value, $(S/\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})_{cr}\approx 0.135$, above which core detrainment occurs. If $MP$ is sufficiently close to unity, both vortices detrain and a two-way mutual entrainment process leads to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}>1$, i.e. merger. In asymmetric interactions and mergers, generally one vortex dominates; the weak/no/strong vortex winner regimes correspond to $MP<,=,>1$, respectively. As $MP$ deviates from unity, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}$ decreases until a critical value, $MP_{cr}$ is reached, beyond which there is only a one-way interaction; one vortex detrains and is destroyed by the other, which dominates and survives. There is no entrainment and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}\sim 1$, i.e. only a straining out occurs. Although $(S/\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})_{cr}$ appears to be independent of Reynolds number, $MP_{cr}$ shows a dependence. Comparisons are made with available experimental data from Meunier (2001, PhD thesis, Université de Provence-Aix-Marseille I).

THE SLAVE TRADE AND ABOLITION REVISITED Herbert S. Klein. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xx + 242 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Bibliographic Essay. Index. $90.00. Cloth. $24.99. Paper. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, eds. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xii + 315 pp. Preface. Notes on Contributors. Introduction by the Editors. Tables. Graphs. Index. $34.95. Paper. Derek R. Peterson, ed. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. II + 235 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Series Editor's Preface. Acknowledgments. Bibliography. Contributors. Index. $64.95. Cloth. $28.95. Paper. $25.00. In the past five years, the world has witnessed an efflorescence of symposia, museum exhibitions, and public commemorations focused on slavery and the slave trade. There have been many events in West Africa, North America, and Europe marking the bicentennial of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade, the two hundredth anniversary of the 1808 U.S. ban on the importation of enslaved labor, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, and the tenth anniversary of France's declaration that slavery and the slave trade constitute crimes against humanity. And last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon designated December 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. Simultaneously (and perhaps not coincidentally), these same years have also witnessed a tremendous growth in the already large body of scholarly literature on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. The three books reviewed here, The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert Klein, Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, and Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, are significant contributions to this literature. The first two do not focus on a single country, region, or continent but engage, rather, in the kind of transnational history that charts the trajectories of often separate, yet interconnected, decisions and events that came to connect and effect so many different peoples from around the world over long stretches of time. The third, Liverpool, focuses on die history of this port's involvement in the Adantic slave trade, but it does so by also positioning Liverpool within the larger British context. Each book addresses a specific set of questions central to the histories of the slave trade, slavery, and imperial studies. But each also brings new information to bear on these questions as well as new perspectives. The Atlantic Slave Trade (2010), for example, is a new edition of Klein's earlier book of the same tide, first published in 1999. But his incorporation in this latest edition of David Eltis's updated and gready expanded quantitative data set on the involvement of Portuguese and Spanish ships in die Adantic trade strengthens his already compelling arguments about the importance of the South Adantic to this enterprise. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery expands upon an already good body of literature on the ports that were so central to the trade in Africa and the Americas, but the authors in this edited volume bring to this area of inquiry the kinds of quantitative data that historians of the ports in Africa would love to access in regard to African ports. It is this quantitative approach that allows the contributors to explain in convincing detail how and why Liverpool outstripped the other major ports in Britain (i.e., London and Bristol) in terms of its involvement in the slave trade while also becoming a center for abolitionist activity. The scholarly literature has long noted the connection between the abolition movement in Britain and Britain's imperialist ambitions. …

Nearly 50 years since Robert Conrad's pathbreaking article on the emancipados of Brazil—published in this journal (volume 53, issue 1)—the history of the Africans liberated from slave ships as the result of measures for suppressing the slave trade has taken a global turn. Yet the scholarship produced as part of this trend has tended to focus on the Anglophone Atlantic.This collection of essays on liberated Africans organized by Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy, two historians of Africa and the African diaspora, brings together for the first time studies covering groups settled in territories of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires as well as independent Brazil and Liberia. Treated as a special and somewhat extraneous group in national histories until the early 2000s, liberated Africans gained renewed attention after the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Then a number of conferences on the circumstances surrounding and conflicts over abolition in various regions counteracted the excessive focus on British actors and events and highlighted the importance of considering the continuation and transformations of the slave trade after 1807. As the unexpected byproduct of the trade's suppression, recaptive Africans settled or resettled in Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, Saint Helena, the British Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, Brazil, Angola, or Indian Ocean territories had similar statuses that stemmed from legislation or treaties aimed at abolishing the slave trade, which required them to serve for a certain period before attaining full emancipation. Liberated Africans stood out as the ideal category for comparing and evaluating the abolitionist campaign's effectiveness.The collection unites some longtime specialists on liberated Africans, many newcomers to the subfield, and others for whom the theme is marginal to their research agendas. The 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections organized according to a mix of chronological, geographical, and thematic approaches: “Origins of Liberated Africans,” “Sierra Leone,” “Caribbean,” “Lusophone Atlantic,” “Liberated Africans in Global Perspective,” and “Resettlements.” In the introduction, Anderson and Lovejoy set the collection within the context of the current debates on the British campaign for the slave trade's abolition and the growing importance of digital humanities initiatives for studying the African diaspora. To be sure, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/), particularly its section on the liberated Africans' names, and the extensive digitization of the Sierra Leone archives have greatly affected recent scholarship. Anderson and Lovejoy estimate that 200,000 men, women, and children were “liberated” during the Atlantic and Indian Ocean phases of the suppression campaign, from 1808 to 1896; the coeditors present a fair overview of how many African recaptives were settled and resettled, where, and on what legal bases. In Latin America, the 11,000 africanos livres of Brazil and 27,000 emancipados of Cuba were included in the editors' count, but smaller groups in Puerto Rico and Martinique were not.British records have been fundamental for this collective endeavor, given the centrality and ubiquity of British institutions and bureaucracy, scattered all over the world, in the abolition campaign. The fairly regular series of documents allow for panoramic, comparative, and also microhistorical approaches. There is a mix of those in this volume, with essays covering the seizure and adjudication of ships in vice admiralty courts, mixed commission courts, or local legal venues as well as the disposal of the Africans for their compulsory terms of service, their daily lives amid slavery or postemancipation and also their resettlement, following intra- and interimperial policies. An integrated history of the slave trade's abolition is taking shape in which the people who were the campaign's object appear at the forefront, their collective experience becoming comparable and in turn giving a new perspective to policymaking and trends in labor, citizenship, migration, gender, international law, cultural transformations, and many other aspects of nineteenth-century history. The great reliance on British archives in this collection is both a strength and a weakness. The book includes chapters on recaptives in Liberia, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, and the Indian Ocean that draw from other documentary collections and reveal the imbalance: outside the British Empire, the continuation of the slave trade well into the 1850s and 1860s made for developments not sufficiently integrated into the narrative of abolition, which is still centered on the British Atlantic. The initiative to compile such a volume is to be praised; it is hoped that the debate will surpass the tunnel vision that frames it for now.This collection will be useful for scholars of the African diaspora, abolitionism, and global history, and a number of the essays will be of keen interest to those studying British diplomatic engagement in Latin America.

Modern economic growth first emerged in Britain about the time of the Industrial Revolution, with its cotton textile factories, urban industrialization and export orientated industrialization. A period of economic growth, industrial diversification and export orientation preceded the Industrial Revolution. This export orientation revolved around an Americanization of British trade for which the slave colonies of the Caribbean were central. The Eric Williams’ explored the extent to which this export economy based on West Indian slavery contributed to the coming of the Industrial Revolution. His claim that profits from the slave trade were crucial to the Industrial Revolution has not stood up to critical evaluation. Nonetheless, modern speculations regarding endogenous growth plausibly postulate that manufacturing, urbanization, and a powerful merchant class all have a favourable impact for growth. These hypotheses need careful consideration. What set the British colonial empire aside from its rivals was not the quality of its sugar colonies but the involvement of the temperate colonies on the North American mainland. Unlike the slave colonies created to exploit staple exports, English emigrants to the northern mainland sought to establish independent settlement. These colonies lacked staple products and residents financed imports by exploited opportunities the empire provided providing for shipping and merchandising and compensating for the lack European market for the timber or temperate agricultural products by exporting to the sugar colonies which, in turn, concentrated on the export staple. The British Empire was unique and its development provided an important and growing diversified and relatively wealthy market for British manufactured goods that all other empires lacked. Although the mainland colonies financed their imports of British manufactured goods by intergrading into the slave-based British Atlantic, it seems likely that in the absence of opportunities in the slave colonies the mainland colonies would have imported similar amounts of British manufactured goods.

The Slave trade, Slavery and Abolition - Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition; Essays to illustrate current knowledge and research. Edited by Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair. Widnes: Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (Occasional Series, Volume 2), 1976. Pp. 244. £8. - Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation; Black Slaves and the British Empire. Edited by M. Craton, J. Walvin and D. Wright. London: Longman, 1976. Pp. xiv + 347. £4.50. - Volume 19 Issue 3

As this chapter traces the development of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, it shows how the authority of what was originally an English state began to rely upon support from the ever-more diverse populations coming under British control. While Scots were the only ones to achieve equality with English people, initially in the Ulster Plantation and later, following the Act of Union of 1707, throughout Britain’s overseas empire, the chapter shows that many of the Protestant and Catholic populations of Ireland also prospered from, and served, the empire, and that many Native Americans and African American slaves were enlisted to serve its cause at moments of crisis. The chapter also addresses the extent to which the governance of the British state and empire was managed by people from military backgrounds, which is unsurprising given Britain’s successive military engagements in Ireland, in Continental Europe and, latterly, in defending its empire.

The end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil was out of phase with emancipation elsewhere. It came nearly a century later than the slave revolt in Saint Domingue, a half-century after the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire, four decades after the final abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and a little more than twenty years after the end of slavery in the United States and of serfdom in Russia. One question is: Why did slavery last so much longer here than it did in many larger societies that were more important on the world scene? In fact, the timing was not so different. The dates of the formal legal emancipation create a misconception. Emancipation in Saint Domingue was an atypcial event, set off by the French Revolution. The French themselves rescinded their Emancipation Act of 1794 once Napoleon was safely in power. British, American, and French emancipations, formally declared between the 1830s and the 1860s, still preserved racial domination, and institutions like Indian contract labor helped to preserve the reality of the plantation complex into the twentieth century. During these same decades, both Cuba and Brazil had begun to dismantle their own slave systems. The Emancipation Act of 1833 for the British Empire, in effect, marked the beginning of a process of liquidating slavery, and the emancipation acts in Brazil and Cuba in the late 1880s came near the end of the same process in those countries.

ABSTRACTThe end of colonial slavery in the British empire, in 1834, was one of the landmark achievements of British imperial liberalism. Emancipation policies, however, were designed to recapture emancipated people; the end of slavery was the beginning of a new kind of captivity to global capitalism and the discipline of wage labour.

This essay examines the connections between the British free trade experiment, the reorganizing of the British Empire and the ultimate suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in its fully global operative context. While most analyses of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade focus on bilateral diplomatic relations or national decision-making processes, this essay puts forth a broader analytical framework. It places the end of the transatlantic illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850 within the dynamics of the world-economy. In a broader sense, this essay sheds new light on debates about capitalism and slavery as it reveals nineteenth-century capitalism not as a static background for historical analysis, but rather as a dialectical process moving through a sequence of disruptive commodity market integrations, each of which posed specific economic and political challenges for slaveholders and antislavery actors alike.

This chapter explores the process through which the enunciative persona of the lawyer as the quintessential political representative in the Indian National Congress gave way to the persona of the samnyasin or renouncer as the new figure of the leader in the movement for independence from British colonial rule. It argues that this change in the mode of leadership was symptomatic of the displacement of the discourse of imperial justice that had framed the political goals of the early Indian National Congress and also determined its mode of politics as pleading and petitioning. With this displacement began the ascendance of a new discourse of transcendental freedom and a mass movement under the new persona of the renouncer as the leader. While independence from British colonial rule was the primary objective of the Gandhian movement, the Gandhian discourse of freedom on which the practice of non-violence was grounded was not derivative of Western notions of legislative and judicial freedom, but rather was genealogically connected with traditional Indian spiritual discourses of transcendental or renunciative freedom.

Focussing on the U.S.-Mexican border from a multi-disciplinary perspective, this is a reflection about the role of female migrants, gender and sexuality in this border's constitutive moments of post-Fordism from a multi-disciplinary perspective. What is the role of labor in these new diasporic subjectivities? What is the relationship between visual culture and technology in the practice and representation of migration? The dialogue between the authors in the second part of this chapter is also about the paradoxes of speaking in translation within and without borders. Like the art workshop held by the authors at ifu, the text is about the collapse of the theoretical with the practical, and the intersections of — rather than borders between — art, theory, and activism.KeywordsFeminist PerspectiveMaterial SpaceFemale MigrantCultural ScriptVisual CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Michael A. Schoeppner (bio) Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade. By Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 345. Cloth, $99.99; paper $29.99.) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s book is not the first study of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, but it is the best. While it includes the story of the nineteen individuals who led the revolt and the story of the diplomatic exchanges by well-known American and British politicians, neither group occupy center stage as they do in previous works. Rather, Kerr-Ritchie’s is an ensemble cast. He provides painstaking detail for his wide range of characters: the slave traders who invested in the American maritime slave trade, the Creole’s crew and “cargo,” the black Bahamians who escorted the formerly enslaved people ashore, British colonial officers, American and British diplomats, and even the lawyers who later litigated the insurance claims in Louisiana’s courtrooms. [End Page 258] Kerr-Ritchie deploys this large cast of characters to situate the Creole revolt within a broad political, social, and economic context. In the first and third chapters, for example, he explains the divergent trajectories of the American and British empires with regard to the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. The geographic proximity of the two empires, especially the British Caribbean and the American South, meant that these diverging political regimes were in frequent contact. The Creole, then, did not just sail the treacherous waters between Florida and the Bahamas, it traveled between two starkly different and increasingly antagonistic political regimes. Likewise, the second chapter situates the fateful Creole voyage within the broader scope of the American maritime slave trade. Kerr-Ritchie aptly demonstrates the continuity of the maritime slave trade before and after 1808. Enslaved people’s experiences of detachment, dread, and violence in the transatlantic slave trade had their counterparts in the interstate maritime trade. The fourth chapter traces the actual brig Creole from its initial construction to its ultimate demise in 1842. The boat was constructed to be an ideal interstate conveyor of enslaved people. Slave trading was big business, and merchant houses, insurance companies, and banking institutions all contributed to its maintenance. So, while readers have to wait more than one hundred pages to reach the actual revolt, they are better prepared to understand it. The Creole rebels might have been an aberration insofar as successful slave “mutinies” go, but the diplomacy of slavery and the interstate maritime slave were anything but aberrational; they sat at the heart of antebellum America. All of this contextual work lays the foundation for Kerr-Ritchie’s recounting of the rebellion and its massive reverberations. While much of the actual revolt is well known, Rebellious Passage offers the reader something important and new by placing people of color at the center of the postrevolt story, not just at the violent climax. The rebels who overtook the ship chose to head for British territory. Once reaching Bahamian waters, the formerly enslaved people decided to leave the vessel and seek protection from British authorities. The British West Indian regiment of black soldiers secured the vessel while diplomats debated the appropriate course of action. Everyday black Bahamians, many working on small watercraft, facilitated the enslaved people’s flight from the ship and forced the hand of the British state. Thus, while white officials at the time put themselves at the center of the Creole’s story of slavery and freedom, Kerr-Ritchie explains that their actions were always in response to people of color on the ground, on the waves, and on the ship itself. This is one of Rebellious Passage’s key contributions; the British state did not free the slaves of the Creole. Rather, [End Page 259] the self-emancipated allowed the British state, itself compelled by its black subjects, to protect the liberty they already held. Rebellious Passage, then, is self-consciously history from the “bottom upward” (xxv). The final four chapters move away from the Bahamas and are largely situated in diplomatic parlors and Louisiana courtrooms...

Reviewed by: Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic by Derek R. Peterson Bronwen Everill (bio) Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson; pp. ix + 235. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010, $64.95, $28.95 paper. Although it is now some years since the flurry of bicentenary activity in commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, the topic remains of interest to historians. This [End Page 122] collection, conceived in that moment, provides analyses of the relationships between slavery, abolition, and imperial control from the founding of the slave trade through the end of empire. Reflecting a twenty-first-century—and post-September 11—trend in abolition history, the volume’s focus on ethics, religion, and the tension between moral and materialistic antislavery exemplifies a changed attitude to the practical effectiveness of religious conviction in actively changing the world. Although material concerns are discussed by Seymour Drescher, Christopher Leslie Brown, Robin Law, and Philip D. Morgan, no author in this collection doubts that there was a strong moral argument for the abolition of slavery. This consensus is refreshing in the context of a book that looks at both abolitionism and imperialism because it acknowledges that one does not have to separate the moral from the imperial or the material from the anti-imperial. Throughout the Victorian era, they were intricately bound together by abolitionism and the civilising mission. This connection is clearest in the essays concerned with the period of Victorian antislavery and empire. Drescher investigates abolitionism’s relationship to imperialism in the nineteenth century, particularly focusing on the case of Sierra Leone. Contributing to the volume’s focus on the importance—and complications—of moral arguments against slavery, Drescher shows that the British, in sticking to their antislavery policy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, also committed themselves to the expense of running an antislavery naval squadron, maintaining the colony of Sierra Leone, and dealing with the diplomatic complications arising from antislavery enforcement. However, as Drescher sees it, while both abolitionism and slavery were related to imperialism, in the era of mid-Victorian imperialism, abolition rarely provided grounds to expand in Africa, with Sierra Leone providing a caveat for any parliamentarians interested in using abolition for those reasons. Drescher makes a valid case that “abolitionism could and did rationalize, but clearly did not cause” the Scramble for Africa (145). His argument that abolition never provided grounds for imperial expansion in Africa (in which he skips from the failure of the Niger Expedition in 1841 to the late 1860s), however, is contradicted by the next chapter, in which Law focuses on three clear instances in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s when British antislavery intervention “came to involve systematic encroachment on the sovereignty of states in Africa” (151). Law argues that the decision to classify slave trading as piracy, combined with the growing opinion that international law did not apply to African states, allowed the British to encroach in the Gallinas, Dahomey, and Lagos. This is a far more convincing argument about the extension of British authority beyond internationally recognized boundaries and helps to challenge the traditional view of the mid-Victorian period as one opposed to expansion in Africa. The chapters covering the antislavery movement’s origins in the imperial anxieties and experimentation of the eighteenth century also help to complicate the moral and material arguments for abolition and empire. Boyd Hilton presents a convincing reassessment of the historiography and memorialization of the British abolition movement. He argues that a combination of factors contributed to a moral crisis for the British Empire and that the different ways in which this moral crisis manifested itself in popular culture, Whig and Tory politics, and international relations shaped the particular trajectory of British abolition. Brown’s chapter explores the often-overlooked Senegambia colony, founded in 1765. The colony reflected many of [End Page 123] the wider mercantile colonial policies of the eighteenth century, and although it was a failure, the speculators involved helped abolitionists and others envision a world that would be more profitable without slavery. Morgan argues that abolition “always involved political machinations, a mix of moral and material motives” (103...

In the article, it is stated that Great Britain had been the biggest empire in the world in the course of many centuries. Due to synchronic and diachronic approaches it was detected time simultaneousness of the British Empire’s development in the different parts of the world. Different forms of its ruling (colonies, dominions, other territories under her auspice) manifested this phenomenon.The British Empire went through evolution from the First British Empire which was developed on the count mostly of the trade of slaves and slavery as a whole to the Second British Empire when itcolonized one of the biggest states of the world India and some other countries of the East; to the Third British Empire where it colonized countries practically on all the continents of the world. TheForth British Empire signifies the stage of its decomposition and almost total down fall in the second half of the 20th century. It is shown how the national liberation moments starting in India and endingin Africa undermined the British Empire’s power, which couldn’t control the territories, no more. The foundation of the independent nation state of Great Britain free of colonies did not lead to lossof the imperial spirit of its establishment, which is manifested in its practical deeds – Organization of the British Commonwealth of Nations, which later on was called the Commonwealth, Brexit and so on.The conclusions are drawn that Great Britain makes certain efforts to become a global state again.

Reviewed by: Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 by Mark G. Hanna Trevor Burnard Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. By Mark G. Hanna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 448. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-1794-7.) In a revealing anecdote that starts this ambitious investigation into the political role of pirates in shaping colonial British American society in the seventeenth century, Mark G. Hanna recalls that Bernard Bailyn asked him whether piracy explained the entire rise of British empire. Hanna cheekily responded that it did. Bailyn demurred. This book is an attempt to show that Bailyn was wrong. Does it succeed? Hanna argues that wherever piracy flourished it was because landed communities had political reasons for hindering imperial attempts to define piracy as entirely criminal. Thus, Hanna sees pirates neither as marginal men detached from ordinary society nor as psychotic criminals. Rather, he sees land-based acceptance of pirate nests as part of colonial attempts to contest the terms of entry into the British empire. Hanna argues that if we are to understand the transformation of English America from 1688 to 1720, then we need to see support and opposition to piracy as part of an extended colonial debate about the terms by which private colonies entered the British empire. Although he covers piracy from Sir Francis Drake onward, Hanna emphasizes the little studied but vitally important years of the 1690s, years in which the position of the American colonies was especially parlous. He makes a convincing case that 1696 was a crucial year in convincing Britain to adopt a fierce antipiracy strategy, headed by Edward Randolph, surveyor general of customs in America and a key agent of imperial change. More to the point, the fierce disputes over piracy in the colonies in 1696 reveal, Hanna believes, alternative views of empire. One side—the side wanting to get rid of pirates and that followed the lead taken by Jamaica as early as 1688—accepted imperial integration as the price of colonial prosperity and efficiency. But other Americans, notably in nonroyal colonies, were more interested in the immediate economic and political benefits that having pirates in their midst brought to hard-pressed and [End Page 143] contentious local societies. The first group won the battle, but the fight over how colonies should be organized within the empire was fierce. Hanna argues that tolerance for pirates was a crucial test of where colonists and colonies stood on the issue of imperial integration. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 is a valuable addition to a sparse literature on politics in this period. The question is whether the political changes of the 1690s that Hanna correctly identifies as fundamental to shaping the eighteenth-century British empire can be attributed almost solely to the war on the pirates that began in that decade and lasted till the 1730s. Here, I think Hanna overstates his case. Bailyn is probably right in downplaying the role of the war on pirates. Hanna’s problem is his treatment of Jamaica, a colony central to his claims and the focus of an important chapter. He believes, correctly, that what happened in Jamaica (the major center of piracy in English America in the 1670s) influenced what happened elsewhere. But his knowledge of Jamaica, based entirely, it seems, on sources held in official archives in London without any immersion into the records kept in the island, is hazy. In particular, he does not fully engage with the influential and convincing arguments of Nuala Zahedieh’s The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660-1700 (New York, 2010) that piracy was an ideal start-up trade for a burgeoning colony, bringing in valuable bullion that helped kick-start the plantation economy. Zahedieh also argues that piracy became a problematic activity once the plantation sector became a significant element in the business strategies of highly influential London merchant-elites. Her argument is based on deep archival research into both Jamaican and British archives. She shows that there were deep-seated social and economic changes occurring in Jamaica in the...