Prof. Isaline Bergamaschi. Sessions 4 & 5 of the course are titled "The roots of resistance: the anti-slavery movement"; this recording covers the opening part, on pirates (slides 1–11). The recording begins mid-sentence. Slide content is integrated and marked in italics; passages in square brackets are editorial notes or unclear in the recording.
[…] looking at the anti-slavery movement, which is generally considered the first truly transnational social mobilisation.
I added something to last year's lecture, for those of you who were unfortunate enough not to pass the exam last year — so just be aware that this is an entirely new section. To be fair, "anti-slavery" is a bit of an exaggeration for what we do first. Let us say this is part one: we will look at pirates as agents — and/or enemies — of globalisation, and then we will dive into the anti-slavery struggle proper. There are connections between the two.
(Slide 2: "Pirates as agents (& enemies?) of globalisation", with the Jolly Roger flag.)
Why would we talk about pirates? What do you know about them? Have you watched the movies, read the books? What do you think of them — are they heroes, are they demons?
[Student discussion.] A first contribution: the image we have is a representation conveyed by the authorities — and, as the student adds, the authorities had supported them before turning against them. Yes. After supporting pirates, the authorities went after them in huge numbers and adopted very strict policies to kill them — mostly by hanging — and the bodies were displayed in the important ports of the cities along the Atlantic, as a form of spectacle and as a disincentive for others tempted to become pirates.
What years are we talking about? Be brave — you will not be two centuries wrong. (Student: early 18th century, with the "republic" of Nassau.) Exactly: around 1710. We will see the different phases, but this is what we are talking about: the beginning of the 1700s, and piracy radically eradicated by 1726.
Public or private? This shows once more — remember the VOC and the colonial enterprises — the public/private blur. Are you acting on behalf of the royal family, the English crown? Are you a public or a private actor? European proto-states supported everything from mercenaries to pirates when they were fighting one another. Britain in particular supported pirates against the crown of Spain — for a while. Then, as Britain slowly but surely became the predominant actor in international trade, its trade routes were destabilised by pirates, and it had big trouble with them.
The presentation of pirates was very negative — just like the Jolly Roger flag itself. Every slave ship at some point flew one of these flags, or an adaptation with small variations. It is a violent imaginary, a reference to death, to knives. It is interesting that, on the great oceans of the 18th century, pirates also used a flag, as states do. They actually cheated with flags: they carried several national flags on their ships, so that if they saw a British vessel from afar, they would fly the English flag to make the others believe they were on the same team. Their real flag was the black one, hoisted as soon as another ship was being closed on after a chase, with a cannon shot across the bow, or just before boarding.
The objective of pirates was usually to scare the other ships so much — through the flags, their appearance, the way they spoke, their reputation — that in most cases the others would not fight. And the traders, traders of commodities as well as of human beings, were paying and treating their crews so poorly that those men were not exactly ready to die for them under the knives and hands of pirates when their ship was caught.
Historians have written a completely different account of piracy. It is available in English and in French: Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Marcus Rediker). There is also a comic book — (slide 3: "Under the Banner of King Death", Verso) — if you are looking for a Christmas present, who knows.
There were three main sites of piracy: Madagascar, the West African coasts, and North America and the Caribbean. See how this articulates with the slave trade: there are areas like today's Sierra Leone where enslaved people were being taken; and you have the plantation economy, remember, on the other side of the ocean. (Map: "Piracy and repression in West Africa".)
A reminder on vocabulary: every time in class I say "slaves", I actually mean enslaved people, because that tells you about the process. They are not slaves by definition; they have been enslaved by somebody.
Pirates would not only take control of trade ships and slave ships; whenever they could, they also took forts, temporarily. Their headquarters were in the Bahamas, but the European powers fought back. The map shows their different victories, where their bases were — one in today's Sierra Leone, where some of them actually settled among the local people — and the big repressions against them.
Overall: about 4,000 pirates on roughly 80 ships, who captured around 2,400 vessels.
Who opposed piracy, and conveyed a very negative image of pirates? Royal officials, attorneys, merchants, publicists, clergymen, writers. They did so for profit: they were part of what Rediker calls "African slave trading capital" — those who, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, had a financial interest in trade in general and the slave trade in particular.
In his book, Rediker uses archives from tribunals — the courts, with testimony from sailors, captains and pirates themselves — as well as written and oral archives, including theatre plays that pirates themselves had written and performed on their ships or in the taverns of the ports where they concentrated.
Mostly we are talking about the "motley crew": a diverse group of marginalised people — multi-ethnic, multinational, proletarian, uneducated, unmarried adventurers, mostly men, poor and childless, in their early 20s to early 30s. In the biographies of pirates, you read that they die very early: you live free, but you die young, and all pirates know it. When Rediker writes about who was hanged and where, the men are usually 28, 29, maybe 32.
Most were former sailors — from royal navies, private trading vessels, mercenary service — people who knew how to work only on the ocean. Some were skilled workers (carpenters, coopers, cooks, surgeons); others were slavers, felons, servants, fishermen, turtlers, bargemen, logwood cutters ("Baymen"), common labourers. Many came from port cities. Their negative experience on naval and merchant vessels generally fuelled their piratical ambitions: they sought vengeance against what Rediker calls the "violent disciplinary regime" of the 18th-century deep-sea sailing ship.
When pirates stopped a vessel, they asked who on board wanted to join them. They were very proud of not forcing people, not kidnapping them — except for key skills, like surgeons and carpenters, whom the pirate ship needed; otherwise, they took only volunteers.
What were they escaping? The sailors who made the expansion of international trade possible were treated as semi-slaves. They lacked food; they lacked water — how much drinkable water can you carry on a boat across the Atlantic? Not enough to avoid dehydration. Hygiene was awful, even worse on slave ships. Even sailors died early, from poor health and very hard working conditions: the salt would literally damage and eat into your body and flesh, and people got hurt working on these boats.
They came from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and secondarily Holland, France, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden and West Africa (particularly Calabar, Whydah and Sierra Leone). There were at least four confirmed female pirates and six confirmed Native American pirates during the late Golden Age. I will not go into detail on that, but rather look at the organising principles.
The idea is that the pirate ship was a laboratory of egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, collectivist and democratic principles.
The establishment of a pirate ship always started with putting up the flag and putting the men on board, whether they wanted to join or not; those who did not could be left somewhere — not necessarily killed. There were huge decisions from the start about how life on the boat would be organised, with some universal principles. One of them: when a ship was captured, there was a big discussion about what to do with its captain and quartermaster, and something happened in the first hours called the "distribution of justice". The pirates talked to the crew of the captured ship and asked: what kind of captain was he? Did he distribute food and water decently, or use authoritarian power — torture, flogging, which was very common on all these ships? If the crew said he was an honest man who always tried to provide enough food and rest, his life was spared — and in most cases it was, because one man on board could speak for him. A bad captain could be tortured and killed. (Slide 7: Captain Skinner was punished; good captains, like James Macrae, were rewarded.)
They earmarked "ready money" for food, drink and healthcare; practised equal distribution of resources, plunder and discipline; held democratic elections and common councils; signed charters / articles of agreement; named their ships Revenge and similar provocative names.
They drank warm rum starting in the morning — so drunk, sometimes, that after a vote some of them were not even able to do what was expected of them. They sang, danced, organised theatre plays and mock trials; and when they were later caught, they mimicked in earnest everything that happened in court. In the archives there are several examples of pirates not apologising at all and not professing loyalty to the crown or to God until the very last moment — just insulting everyone until they were hanged, joking about their own death, and saying they were proud of the life they had: the only life a sensible man could have in this world.
They engaged in homosociality and homosexual activity (matelotage). On some boats the presence of women was strictly prohibited, as a way to avoid problems, sexual violence and competition. I am not saying everything was perfect: they stopped quite often in Sierra Leone to visit women, and given that they were only men on the ocean for a long time, completely drunk, I am not sure that everything was okay on that side.
They had an "ethos of apocalypse", the omnipresence of death and monstrosity ("die free but young"; Blackbeard cultivated an image of Satan). When caught, many blew up their vessels with the powder on board or jumped overboard, to avoid court and the hangman.
They liked slave ships a lot, because of their architecture, the space and the structure. In that case they would take the enslaved people on board, as with other crews: many of the enslaved people were keen to join the pirates, since they saw they had nothing to lose, given what they had seen on that slave ship. Sometimes they left the enslaved people on the ship; sometimes they sold them to other merchants. Nothing was perfect.
The outcomes of their action were nevertheless huge, because they were attacking what was becoming central — the lifeblood of the emerging capitalist economy. They truly disturbed and disrupted international trade and the slave trade; they stole, redistributed, squandered and destroyed commodities en masse; they frightened commercial and government officials; they halted English shipping and created something approaching a crisis in trade.
At their best, they offered the possibility of a more egalitarian, multinational social order. When pirates were about to be hanged, riots and strikes were organised in solidarity [the reference to "courts in the US" is unclear in the recording]: in the docks, among the sailors, there was identification with the pirates rather than opposition to them.
What they did was very political, because they challenged what characterised the 18th century — the emergence of race and of the racist system, of the nation-state, of private property, of class and gender hierarchies:
Their victories against European forts in the Caribbean and in West Africa were massively popular in the pop culture of the time. Plays, stories and biographies about pirates were very common and became popular as printing generalised, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries their memory lived on in the city of London, with theatre plays showing the trajectories and lives of pirates. As the slide puts it, the pirates "triumphed in the end", winning the battle for the popular imagination in their own day and in ours.
Rediker offers one illustration of the possible impact of these ideas — egalitarianism, an anti-trade, anti-nation, anti-slave-trade project and practice. He argues, with lots of evidence, that the representation of a pirate in the Dutch-language edition (1725) of Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates [the recording says "male pirate", but the passage that follows — "this woman here, the same there" — suggests the figure is a woman; the passage is garbled] inspired another painting you may know: Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830). When Delacroix was painting, he says, this illustration of piracy was everywhere in European elite, artistic and political circles — Rediker provides evidence of that. In the slide's words, the image of piracy preceded the image of liberty by more than a century.
That is just one way of saying that these ideas and projects — concrete experiences of emancipation — [are part of the roots of] the anti-slavery movement [the recording ends mid-sentence here].