Dan Snow's History Hit - Wars in the Atlantic World

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

How has warfare shaped the way humans live in the Atlantic World? Well, a lot. Military campaigns from the late Middle Ages to the Age of Revolution drove the development of technologies like ships, port facilities, fortresses, and roads. Crossing the ocean was made possible, connecting previously separate lands, nations and empires from Europe to West Africa and North and South America.In this episode, Professor of Early Modern History Geoffrey Plank joins Dan to discuss how connecting the lands of Europe, West Africa and North and South America brought commerce, expansion, empires, the slave trade and more conflict on land and sea. They compare the European, African, and indigenous American experiences of warfare, violence, and military culture over a period of four centuries.Produced by Hannah Ward.Edited by Pete DennisIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is a treat. I've been looking forward to this one for ages. I've been recently reading a brilliant book by Geoffrey Plank. He's a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia. It's all about the Atlantic Wars of the early modern period. It's all about the gigantic, violent, savage, omni-shambles that followed basically Christopher Columbus heading over to the Americas and the European powers piling in, freelancers piling in, states piling in and it all just going completely crazy. This is a podcast in which we talk about that impact of that transformation of global strategic geography on the people involved, on the Africans that were enslaved and transported across

to the New World, on the indigenous peoples of America and Africa, of the Europeans, the sailors, the soldiers who found themselves dealing with tropical diseases, Arctic temperatures in Canada, and starvation on storm-tossed vessels in the Atlantic. It's a big canvas this, folks. Get ready for it. If you like listening to me get very overexcited about 18th century history, then fear not. Both of you will be fine. There is a remedy. You can get a History Hit TV. If you follow the link in the information to this podcast, you'll get taken to a place called History Hit TV, which is a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, just for history. We've got documentaries on there. Yes, we do. We've got audio on there. Lots of it. All the back episodes of this podcast,

all our sibling podcasts are on there. Go to that link. It's like going through the wardrobe into Narnia. It's a beautiful thing. And if you sign up today, you get two weeks free, and you get every month for less than the price of a pint of beer. So head over there and do that. But in the meantime, folks, it's Professor Geoffrey Plank. We're talking about the Atlantic world. You're going to enjoy this. Geoffrey, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. When this book lands on my doorstep, I've got to say, it brought me extreme happiness. This is exactly my period and what I find so fascinating. Talk to me about the Atlantic world. What do we mean by that?

And how surprising is its existence? It's one of the moments in history when this geographical space becomes a reality. Yeah, well, there are a couple of important things I wanted to get across. I guess I would say three things I wanted to get across about the Atlantic world in this book. The first is, and that's, I think, the main idea of Atlantic history, is that there's a sort of shared experience that brings together people from Africa and the Americas and Europe. And one of the things I'm trying to argue strongly is that to really get a grasp of the transformations that are happening in each of those places, you need to think about them all and think about the history of the Atlantic world altogether. Another point that I want to make, which you're getting at, is that, you know, obviously before the 15th century, there wasn't

that kind of Atlantic world. This is something that happened at a specific period of time. And, you know, it's a huge transformation. And then the last point is that the Atlantic world is different from the Indian Ocean. It's different from the Asian coasts of the Pacific and so forth. That this is not a global history. It's a from the Asian coasts of the Pacific and so forth. This is not a global history. It's a history of a very particular region. And the transportations that take place there are very different from the transformations that are happening at the same time in other parts of the world. As a big fan of maritime history, it's something very helpful for a modern audience to understand the nature of maritime connectivity, is that for people living in Bristol or Cork

and Lisbon and Guinea and Barbados and Virginia, the exchange and the money, the people, the weapons, the sailing systems that were being used were more similar than you might find, for example, from Bristol over to Poland or something like that. You bring that so strongly alive in your work. No, that's right. Actually, one of the things that's very important to me about this work was to start with the ships and men who were on the ships going from port to port and that their whole experience, their lives were not rooted to one place, obviously, but moving around. And they were really creating, you know, they were the core of the original Atlantic community. And you're right that interior Eastern Europe would be a very, very different kind of world. But, you know, it's important when you think about these sailors to

realize that they come from a huge area. You know, I wouldn't write off the possibility that there are a fair number of poles on these ships, but they're being absorbed into a different world, a different community when they become sailors and get sort of sucked into the Atlantic world, so to speak. How should we characterize this Atlantic world? It's a story of European discovery. I know that word's difficult, but the Europeans find Central, North, and South America. There's a colonial project there immediately. There's also a capitalist project around raw materials immediately in that. And Europeans emigrating to those places. And then there's this gigantic forced migration of enslaved people from Africa being taken there.

I mean, it's so big to get your head around. But how do you characterize what begins to happen, even just in the decades that follow the first Spanish and then Portuguese journeys and English journeys across the Atlantic. I'm glad you sort of hesitate when you talk about discovery. And obviously, we've gone through a couple of generations of people wrestling with that problem of how are we going to express the fact that things changed when the Europeans arrived, and they were the ones who crossed the ocean. And I wanted to start with the importance of ships. And you're right to focus on the first couple of decades, because huge things change after Columbus's voyage.

But in a way, I think one of the things I want to do is not be afraid to emphasize the importance of ships. And that doesn't mean glorifying the ship captains or siding with the conquistadors. But something fundamentally changes when people begin to have the capacity to cross the ocean. And one of the critical things that's there from the beginning and stays true for the next several centuries is that the ships are representing European capital. They don't literally always have people of European descent as captains, but most of the time they do. And basically, the European dominance of that ocean-going travel explains a lot about everything else that happens. European power is not secure

inland in North or South America, and certainly not in Africa. Europeans have a very hard time maintaining a real extensive territorial control and land in Africa. But they have the ships, and that means that they control mass migration, that they control transatlantic trade. And like you say, that gets exploited right from the start with gold mining in the Caribbean and so forth. Yeah. And these ships as well, they can access international, I mean, I thought of a better word, help. When there are multiple examples of existential crises for European forts on the African coast, settlements and plantations in the Americas, they're overwhelmed. But the Europeans are then able, like a sort of self-healing network, to draw on over-the-horizon assistance, money, troops, and weapons that often their indigenous Americans or their African counterparts are less able to do. It seems that the ships give that elasticity, that resilience to the European system that in the end is undefeatable.

Yeah, well, I think one of the reasons I got interested in all the issues of this book date back a very long time. And my first book was about Nova Scotia. And one of the reasons I got interested in all the issues of this book date back a very long time. My first book was about Nova Scotia. And one of the questions I was wrestling with in Nova Scotia was that you had a very small British garrison in Nova Scotia that really seemed militarily vulnerable to the Mi'kmaq and French nearby. about just a few dozen men, but they hold on for decades, then eventually they vastly expand their power in the region. But I was wondering about that long period, really, where they're really just a few dozen men in a fort, and how do they maintain themselves? And it's all about ships, because ships can deliver supplies, but like you were saying, it's also that ships can deliver reinforcements, and that the ships are themselves powerful weapons platforms. And everybody in the region knew that behind that small garrison was this whole maritime network, which really, like you say,

I think it's critical for the whole military balance of power, at least on the coast. And it was, you know, to say the same thing again, it's important that it was basically controlled by Europeans and European colonists. And then also the gunpowder weapons on those ships is such an important story. As you point out, the gunpowder weapons are very attractive to African states in terms of getting enough people, enslaved prisoners from those states, to work on the plantations in the New World, but also to subdue indigenous opposition, but also colonial rivalries. The cannon and the musket are, again, especially mounted on these

vessels, extraordinary force multipliers, aren't they? It's often one or two cannon can dissuade hugely powerful and very sophisticated hostile forces from seizing those little outposts like the ones you mentioned. I think that's right. But it was also important for me to emphasize the limitations of this. And one huge limitation is obviously you need deep water to get a ship with a cannon anywhere near being in striking distance. And so I think one of the things that happens is that you have a region that Europeans can dominate and then not far away in most of these colonial contexts, there are places where the ships just aren't helpful anymore.

In a way, we're still living with the legacies of that perception of landscape and regions that were established in that early period. You know, a lot of the mythology of America has to do with places that are safe and places that are dangerous. And you can really see this from a European perspective very early on, in that sense that if you had a ship, then you were safe. And if you were away from the range of the guns, then you were not. And it's also good that you're emphasizing the cannons because handheld weapons don't have that same effect, partly because very quickly, indigenous Americans and Africans get handheld gunpowder weapons. And so they don't give that sense of invulnerability or security

to European forces. If you look at the Atlantic world, you get a situation where you get European competition, the Dutch, occasionally even the Swedes, but the Brits, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese. So it sounds like perhaps something more familiar to those who study the 19th, 20th century state-led imperial competition. But I think what comes out strongly from your work is how much freelancing was going on. You know, maybe the Atlantic world was, and we should discuss whether it was, but it was bloody and violent and chaotic because they were making this stuff up, finding new bits to carve out their own little empires and telling London six months later what they'd done. And London was like, okay, I guess we're doing this now. And same with other colonial powers. Do you think it's

fair to say that this is, I mean, obviously you've got the 30 years war going on in Europe, it's not exactly afternoon tea, but there is something so anarchic and bloody about these clashes in the Atlantic world. Or is that about race as well? Yeah. In a way, it's just a function of how long it takes for information or people to cross the ocean. Throughout the whole period from the 15th century to the early 19th, clashes that started in North America or the Caribbean or Africa between Europeans, they had to take on their own dynamic. There was no way to send home to get permission for what you were going to do next or authorization

or anything of the sort. So there is that sort of chaotic nature. And early on in the period, Europeans sort of acknowledged this and put it into treaties that wars that start in the Americas aren't going to trigger wars in Europe. But there's also an important chronological shift as you move into the 18th century that much more European investment in navies and armies and manpower is sent to the Americas to engage in campaigns. It starts really with the War of Jenkins' Ear in the Caribbean in 1739, and then much more so in the Seven Years' War.

But what starts to happen as you get into the 18th century is these small-scale battles in the Americas turn into literally global conflicts. You know, what you were saying early on, it feels like, well, there's just always fighting everywhere. That this becomes a very different, it seems different to all the people living around the Atlantic world, because suddenly they are all simultaneously engaged in one big battle that may have seemed to have started a long time ago somewhere obscure, but now they're all engaged in it. And that's a huge change, I think, in the way people think about warfare as you move into the second half of the 18th century. But also the kind of kaleidoscopic political fragmentation of the Atlantic world. You end up with these overlapping loyalties. You get kind of British planters and free black people working with British planters,

smuggling or secretly trading with French or American revolutionary enemies, trying to outstrip Royal Navy vessels who are then trying to suppress the slave trade. You can get some very weird situations developing in this Atlantic world. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think it gets weirder the more you kind of go down from the level of admirals and generals and sort of look at the experience of individual fighters. A strange example of this, an enslaved man escapes a plantation in South Carolina and joins the British army to try and get away from the American patriots who want to hold him in slavery. And then the American patriots have

on their side, black militia, free black people from Saint-Domingue who have their own interests. And so basically, you've got two groups of people of African descent who, in their own ways, are escaping slavery or putting slavery behind them. In the case of the Saint-Domingue militiamen, they may have been slaves in their own lifetime or have enslaved parents or grandparents, but they're on opposite sides in this war. You can only kind of speculate to a certain extent. Actually, sometimes there are autobiographical accounts. But like you were saying, there's clearly divided loyalties and divided interests. And actually, in the autobiographical accounts, Boston King, who was the man escaping slavery

in South Carolina, is very clear on this. He loves the fact that the British are helping him out of slavery. But at the same time, he does say that this is a battle between white people and black people. You see, kind of at the end says he transcends that perspective. But, you know, everybody is engaging in multiple conflicts at once in all of these wars. And actually, that perception that there's a huge racial conflict becomes clearer as you move later into the early modern period. It's a dynamic that really changes the politics of the late 18th century.

Yeah, I was reading about the Babis slave uprising in the Seven Years' War in Guyana against the Dutch. I was struck by the ferocity of the enmity between the indigenous people and the slaves or the former slaves. I mean, that's just a whole level of complexity on top of this basic Dutch slave relationship. That's right. In a way, it's an obvious thing, but to say there are not innocent parties in virtually any of these conflicts, and then you kind of look at

why are the indigenous people taking the part that they do and putting down the slave revolt, you can understand why everybody's doing what they're doing. But I think you have to keep in mind that they're all doing, in different ways, terrible things to each other.

And that's another thing I really wanted to get across as best we can, a kind of lived experience of these conflicts. This is not something that you could easily just sort of look at abstractly. There's some real nastiness going on all over the place. If you listen to Dinosaur's History here, we're talking about war and sailing and conquest and slavery and money in the Atlantic world.

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wherever you get your podcasts. yeah speaking of lived experience i mean again we think of ourselves as very well traveled but these are people who would leave again say atlantic portugal normandy uh cork cornwall and they would travel thousands of thousands of miles in the space of a life at sea. They would survive mutiny, shipwreck, storms, uprisings. They would witness violence every day, frankly, let alone big intergroup violence, which they'd probably see. It's epic. The things that normal men and women were thrown into, it's extraordinary. That's right. I think it's a slightly different point than the point about innocence, but I think it's very important when you think about these people moving around so extensively, and every

time they move, they meet a different group of people, so that in a way, the shared experience grows exponentially. If you meet people who've been to Africa, even if you haven't been to Africa, you're likely to find out more about Africa. I think that we underestimate how connected early on the Atlantic world was and how much people actually knew. I mean, including Africans knowing about the Americas and knowing about Europe, there's actually quite a lot of exchange of information. Some of it we can recover in documentation, but there must have been a lot more just with sailors talking and drawing people together. I think about this sort of struggle for the Atlantic world and how it must have seemed if you'd been a wealthy Northern Italian banker or if you were in Vienna. It must

have initially seemed like these crazy Western Europeans are just going mad, you know, like sending fleets out and half of them are not coming home. And the Cartagena expedition in 1740, like appalling losses and disease. And then suddenly it changes. And then by the 20th century, the Atlantic world is basically the kind of locus of international financial and industrial power. What happens in these centuries that you talk about has a gigantic impact on subsequent world history, doesn't it? Definitely it does. And

things change, like you say, in the late 18th century. One of the things that changed, you were talking about this whole, you're crazy to invest all this money in ships that might get attacked or sink. But there's a whole school of thought about capitalism, which says that it isn't discipline and hard work and all that actually generates economic growth, but sort of a crazy risk taking in that early period. But that's actually generates economic growth, but sort of a crazy risk-taking in that early period. But that's actually one of the things that changes as you move into the 19th century. There's an interesting book that's come out basically mining the insurance records, looking at the rate of privateering and piracy moving from the 18th to the 19th century.

And basically, commerce gets less violent, more regulated, and then there's another sort of economic explosion in the 19th century. That's another point that I really want to get across in this book is that the world I'm describing is before that order is established. And it is a discrete period, it does end, I mean, a bell doesn't go off and say, okay, that's the end of that world. But basically, as you move into the 19th century, things are quite different. Is it, come back to my earlier point, like, is this about imperialism by private enterprise as well? I'm thinking to myself, you know, I'm sure that Rome's crumbling frontiers were all about,

I'm sure there were merchants and traders and slave traders at the heart of that. It wasn't just Julius Caesar deciding to stick one to his senatorial competitors by invading Gaul. just Julius Caesar deciding to stick one to his senatorial competitors by invading Gaul. But some conquest feels more obviously state-led, you know, Alexander the Great or whoever, Napoleon Bonaparte. This feels, initially, exactly in the period you're talking about, it feels quite freelance, doesn't it? And is that something that gives it its character? I think so, yeah. And on that level, I think that there are differences between the empires.

Yes. I mean, the Spanish, after they've sent Columbus across, they invest more in navies and protection of the treasure fleet and so forth. And they do want to have more control, but they also have to delegate

enormous power to the conquistadors and basically, like you said, send them out on their own to make their own decisions. But at any rate, there's a tighter interest in state control in the Spanish Empire than there is certainly in the English Empire when it gets going. But overall, in the Spanish Empire or the English Empire or any of them, they end up sending relatively small groups of, like you say, private actors in effect, or sort of certainly people with delegated authority to go out and work out their own problems in different parts of the Atlantic world.

I think probably the most dramatic example of that is the slave trade. The slave trade in every step of the way, including controlling enslaved labor in America, was military. This is a military operation, especially when you look at the actions of slave traders on the coast of Africa. especially when you look at the actions of slave traders on the coast of Africa. They are improvising every step of the way, and they are all acting, in effect, as private actors with military force. But these are hugely armed, overmanned ships that are basically anticipating combat in every part of their operations. But they're not, to get back to the point about state control, they're not at all operating with orders from governments or in any coordinated way. I think that to think about Atlantic wars, you have to think beyond state-controlled mobilizations of violence, you know, that these wars are not all just wars between governments. And I would say that slave trade's

the best example of that. I think also there's these extraordinary moments when the American colonists in the 17th century briefly capture Quebec in Canada, and it's unclear whether any government knows what's going on. It is just a very anarchic world. And sometimes you think, of course, there are politicians in Europe, I'm pulling out the hat of a movie like The Duke of Newcastle, some people who probably find this quite a distraction from the business of what they want to get on with, which is sort of playing a European power game on the continent. Oh, yeah, that happens all the time. The actual Louis XIV in various episodes was to restrain

the French from what they want to do against the English Empire. And that campaign against Quebec in 1690, I guess, is another sort of a high political example of people having divided loyalties or different ways of thinking about what they're fighting for. Because basically, part of the motivation for that campaign was that this was a battle of Protestants against Catholics. And people like Cotton Mather were thinking that they were, you know, on God's side and were willing to ally with Protestants of different nations in a fight against the Catholic French. But the Massachusetts government that was organizing this did not have permission even to operate from William and Mary. William and Mary had not, and ultimately would not, accept the structure, the charter of the Massachusetts

government. So it was basically an illegal government that was attacking the French in Quebec, which was extremely worrisome for the people of Massachusetts and for the government of Massachusetts. And other historians have written about this. One of the manifestations of those anxieties is the Salem witch trials, which come right afterwards. And they reflect this sort of sense of, do we have the right to be doing what we're doing? Do we have authority to be doing what we're doing? And that chaos that you're talking about, it was unsettling in very profound ways, I think, especially around that incident. Let's just finish up maybe by talking about some of the, a lot of ways to die. Yeah.

I was very struck from the enslaved Africans who died in extraordinary numbers on the Middle Passage, the first Middle Passage, and from the brutality of the plantation network. But the disease, heat, cold, I'm not claiming early modern, late medieval. Europe was, again, a picnic. But it feels like you were taking on extraordinary risk when you were traveling to these places. And there are a lot of ways to die. That's right. And I think people knew it as well. And I guess that's another reason why I particularly wanted to look at the sailors more than the admirals or whatever, because I think a lot of the sailors very clearly

went into sailing because they had no choice. A fair number of them were physically abducted. Other people were sort of abandoned as children and had no other way to support themselves. But the people going into this violent world, most of them, I think, would have known the risks and the dangers of what they were getting into. But the scale of death is shocking, thinking about it from our perspective now. I mean, even the European numbers where you're talking about, you know, somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the adult male populations dying in military service. I mean, it was a huge cost of wars in this period. And then the examples that swamp everything else is the spread of disease in the Americas and the death among indigenous Americans. But the slave trade also, you know, literally millions and very hard to count the number of people who were killed

in the slave trade because we don't have records from the interior of Africa about, you know, who was killed in the process of enslaving people. I keep saying I'm going to let you go, but I got another question for you, which is, let's talk about the British example for a sec. How does it change Britain? Like initially, it's Britain thinking, we are going to send out these wild pirates and slave traders like Hawkins and Drake. It begins in the 16th or 15th with Cabot. And yet by the 18th century, you've got the people enriched by that process, dominating Parliament, you know, that sort of maritime slavery industrial complex, call it whatever you want, you know, huge, really powerful in Parliament, changing the political class, the aristocracy.

Does the process of this Atlantic world almost overwhelm all the states that surround it, be they indigenous American, African, or the European states? I think it definitely does. And if you look at the Royal Africa Company, which was led by the future James II from its founding, and through the Bank of England and the insurance companies that were sort of financing and securing the investment in the slave trade, yeah, it totally transforms British politics. And some of the earliest lobbying efforts, large scale lobbying efforts in Parliament are surrounding the slave trade and trying to break up the Africa company so that

individual investors can come in and engage in the slave trade. So it changes the way Parliament works. You know, the amount of wealth that comes into Britain is obviously transformative. The investment in navies is obviously transformative in the way that taxes are collected. And, you know, it's just literally the size of government. It's not just Britain. You know, the whole violent economy of the Atlantic world changes politics, like you say, on every continent. And the fact that it's violent, which is, again, something that needs to be emphasized, it's the fact that it's violent that makes it necessary to invest in the way that these

governments invest. And that's actually, ironically or not ironically, but it's important that it's violent partly because it's difficult because of the military power of indigenous Americans and Africans. It's their participation in this whole violent economy that makes it necessary for the Europeans to spend the way they are and to reorganize their politics and economy the way they do. That's interesting. So it's not European rivalries, it's the indigenous opposition. One of the critical things is that wars between European empires always involve indigenous people

in Africa or the Americas. You know, in this Atlantic context, there aren't straightforward battles between European empires in isolation. Well, I could talk about this all day, but I've got to let you go. Everyone go and buy the book. What's the book called? Atlantic Wars from the 15th Century to the Age of Revolution. It's got everything from poisoned arrows to barrel staves in there. So go and check it out, everybody.

Thank you very much for coming on. Okay, well, thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of danston's history as i say all the time i love doing these podcasts they are the best thing i do professionally i feel very lucky to have you listening to them if If you fancied giving them a rating and review, obviously the best rating and review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us.

I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well,

dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods.