Sea Changes: Maritime Men and the Law in the Global Atlantic World

Abstract

Sea Changes:Maritime Men and the Law in the Global Atlantic World Molly A. Warsh (bio) Mark G. Hanna. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2015. ix + 448 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Kevin P. McDonald. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. xii + 206 pp. Illustration, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 372 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Empires, religion, spices, slaves. Disease and death. Crusaders, traders, renegades, dissenters. Hybridity, metropoles, and peripheries. These are some of the keywords of three decades of pathbreaking Atlantic World scholarship in works that have revealed how the exchanges of the period from 1500 to 1800 knit together the people, places, and practices brought into contact by these disparate actors and impulses. Historians have traced how early Iberian imperial momentum gave way to the incursions of ambitious Northern European powers. The centrality of the trade in enslaved Africans; the devastation and, in places, recovery, of America’s indigenous people; the explosive politics and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—these are all well-established narratives in our understanding of the emergence of the Atlantic World. What remains to be discovered? The answer provided by the three books under review here can be broadly characterized as twofold: first, “illegal” activity at sea—by so-called “pirates” or by press gangs unlawfully seizing mariners—played a critical role in the elaboration of politics and economies on land. Second, these seagoing men forged global pathways and practices that broaden our understanding of the boundaries of the Atlantic World. Although these books are very different in style and approach, each embraces seafarers as political actors. As Hanna and McDonald tell it, pirates are not renegades but colonial service providers; Perl-Rosenthal’s sailors are [End Page 524] rough and tumble diplomats at the forefront of citizenship debates. Through his consideration of the legality of various types of actions at sea, each author asks us to consider how the maritime world was both distinct from, and critical to, the development of the societies along its shores. Hanna and McDonald both focus on global piracy and colonial commerce from the perspective of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British Atlantic. McDonald’s embrace of world history as a meaningful challenge to the Atlantic World paradigm opens the door to questions of greater scope than his brief text (130 pages plus appendices) allows him to explore. Hanna offers a lengthy study of the centrality of illicit maritime activity to the economies and politics of colonial British America, leaving little doubt that “piracy” was business as usual by another name until the imperial goals and function of the British Empire shifted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In tracing this trajectory, neither Hanna nor McDonald departs from Roy Ritchie’s classic study of Captain Kidd and the changing politics of piracy in England in the early eighteenth century; indeed, both acknowledge their debt to him. Perl-Rosenthal also looks at maritime men on the wrong side of ineffective laws, but in his case, the drama is neither imperial tensions nor global trade rivalries, but rather nation building and citizenship claims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His protagonists are not pirates, per se, but seafarers determined to prove their allegiance to the new American nation on the fraught waters of post-Revolutionary years. In his telling, U.S. sailors forced the elaboration of new forms of national identification amidst impressment controversies in the wake of the American Revolution. Determined to claim nationality based on personal politics rather than birth or native language, U.S. mariners helped forge an unprecedentedly broad view of citizenship on land that was expressed in maritime passports for American citizens regardless of race. McDonald’s book is the most global-minded of the three, and his explicit intellectual engagement with world history...