Sea Control - Sea Control 505 - Pirates of the Slave Trade with Dr. Angela Sutton

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Links: 1. Pirates of the Slave Trade – The Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution, by Angela C. Sutton, Prometheus Books, 2023. 2. Angela Sutton's Website

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Dr. Angela Sutton to discuss her book, Pirates of the Slave Trade. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Angela Sutton, and we're going to discuss her book, Pirates of the Slave

Trade, the Battle of Cape Lopez, and the Birth of American Institution. So, Angela, welcome on board, could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Thanks. Yeah. Hi, Jared. So my name is Dr. Sutton and I teach at Vanderbilt University and most of my work is research focused though. And this book, Pirates of the Slave Trade, it's been 15 years in the making. So I'm so excited to finally just have it out there in the world. It took me that long because a lot of the primary sources that I use are from, let's see, I went to archives in Germany in Sweden and the Netherlands and England, and of course, here in the US as well. So I've been working with my agent, Eric Hain, and kind of rewriting the story, rethinking the story and

kind of pulling out the bits that I think a lot of Americans would be really interested in that they just haven't heard yet. Well, no question that this is interesting. I said to you right before we started recording, I meant it's that there's about five different ways that we could have gone with different lines of questioning here to get into all this. You mentioned all those places that you had to go to do your archival research. Did you have to learn four different languages to get through this here? Or were you able to kind of like battle through with, you know, some support from locals or how'd that work? Yeah, on paper, it certainly looks impressive. But the truth is that I'm an army brat. So my mother is German. So I grew up speaking

German as my first language. And then when you look at, so this book takes place in the 1700s. And back then, the Hanseatic League was like the main trading league in the Baltic region. And so the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Germany, all the countries that sort of border that sea, they all agreed to kind of speak in this 17th century Dutch as like the business language. And so all their documents are in the same language, essentially. And 17th century Dutch is actually closer to German than it is to modern Dutch. And so I had a really easy time. Like I just I took a course at Columbia University, the summer course with Vanya de Goudt. She's amazing.

And she really taught me a lot about how to apply my German skills to that language. So I was able to read all of those. But then, of course, I can say, yes, I read four languages. Like, how impressive am I? But not really that impressive. No, that's excellent. I'll have some follow-up questions for you later on. But as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions that you hear today are our own and not representative

of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Angela, what entities were initially competing in the slave trade in this area? And what was their relationship with their respective governments? yeah so the history of the slave trade is super complex because really what it amounts to it kind of fits in with this um european desire to be first in the new world and to figure out everything like once once henry the navigator essentially figured out how to build a boat that was strong enough to withstand everything and get to the americas and get to africa after that every other european nation that wanted to throw its hat in the ring for for being superpower right like didn't

have that word then, but that's essentially what they were doing. They all kind of competed. And so you have, of course, Portugal and Spain, just because they're right there geographically, like they jut into the ocean furthest. So they got there first. They get to Africa first and it's mostly a royal imperative. So it's the kings and queens who are asking traders to go into Africa looking for gold initially. After that, the Dutch and the English see how much gold is being pulled out and they realize that it's really the Catholic world that's benefiting from all of this, right? It's Portugal and Spain. It's also the Italian families that are investing in all of this. And a lot of the Protestant countries are being left out. And so they decide that they need

to put all of their power straight into the Navy as well. They end up building big fleets. They go to Africa and they try to just fight for whatever's left. And so when you get to the Gold Coast, which is where a lot of my book takes place, which is modern day Ghana, it's called the Gold Coast because it had alluvial gold that kind of came to the surface after a rain. And so it would shimmer when you're coming from a ship to that country. But all that gold got panned quite quickly because it didn't really have that much. Not on the surface.

There were some mines that they found were golden later. But they realized that it was a wonderful place to try to impose their will upon the locals and pull people out. And yeah, so you have Netherlands and England. They're each other's main competitors. But you have Portugal and Spain who sometimes work together, sometimes don't.

It depends on where they're at in their history. Sometimes you have the dual crowns. they're together, sometimes they're not. And then later on in that later period, so like the late 1600s, you get the smaller players who try to like throw their hat in the ring a little bit too late, right? It's kind of like when you get like early adopters, the mass and then the stragglers. So you get the stragglers, so like Brandenburg, right, Prussia, which would become part of Germany later. So Prussia ends up in doing its investigations. And the Prussian materials are the most interesting because they're the latest to the slave trade. By the time Prussia gets in there, Europe has

pretty much sewn up that whole coast of West Africa. And there are fortresses that Europeans have built all along the coast. And they're so close to each other that you can like throw a stone from one to the other if you've got a really good arm, like, you know, a baseball arm, not like an average arm, but still, they're really close. And so when Prussia comes in, they realize that they have no options. They have to go with whatever the Africans want from them. And so John Connie sees this opportunity in these latecomers and exploits that. Now, John Connie is a prince who grew up witnessing his family and his people in West Africa, the Ahunta, being treated quite terribly by first the Swedes and then the English and then the Dutch.

So by the time the Prussians come in, he already knows what Europeans want. He knows how they behave to get it. He knows what he can promise them in order to keep them around. And so he uses them and uses them to build one of the biggest, strongest castles in West Africa, which he later moves into as if it is his let's divert to the uh piracy issue then uh how did the piracy problem along the gold coast come to exist yeah so that that that problem um begins in the caribbean works that's why we always know pirates of the caribbean but we don't know pirates of the slave trade and that's because in the caribbean right when this like grab for the americas was happening all of these european powers would come in and try to grab pieces of the americas and they

would carve up the Americas. You know, there was a papal bull. So the Pope kind of made that determination with the Treaty of Tordesilla. But then, of course, the Protestant countries were like, we don't listen to the Pope. Like, we don't have, we're not beholden to the Pope. We do what we want. And so they came in and started taking properties that were claimed by Spain and Portugal. And then France came, of course. And so you have all these European powers that are fighting each other and trying to continuously take islands from one another. And so what happens is that pirates are the perfect chaos agent that kind of comes in during this chaos period. And they too take what they want, but they realize that it's a better living if instead of just taking what you

want, you find someone who's very, very upset at having things taken from them and you offer your services. And so pretty soon pirates become the de facto navies of these small Caribbean territories, right? So you have most of these European governors, they're in charge of these islands in the Caribbean, they hire a bunch of pirates. They say, hey, friends, we will give you this whole section of the island you can be at. You can pirate whoever you want, just not people with the same flag as our island. And we will support you. We'll let you build your brothels and your pubs and your businesses, and we can all get rich together. And so that was sort of like how sea power, how security worked in the Caribbean in the 1600s. Now, this time period,

were starting to move into the late 1600s, the early 1700s, something ships. And what ships is essentially that Europeans finally figure their stuff out. They have enough ships to secure their own borders. They don't need pirates anymore. So once they no longer need pirates, they decide they need to hunt them down in order to eliminate the threat that they pose because they're losing way too much money on the pirate attacks. And so all these pirates in the Caribbean who had been there for years and years, they get hunted down and they push into West Africa out of desperation. They essentially have to cross the Atlantic to get away from all these pirate hunters that come to hunt them down. So now we're in the 1700s, early 1700s, we have pirates flooding the

West African coast and slave traders have no way of protecting themselves from the pirates because it was never really a huge problem before then. And these pirates are coming to West Africa because what they really want is to find a ship that is big enough and strong enough and well fortified enough, like with enough supplies to take them around the Horn in Africa and to go into the East Indies, because the East Indies still have some opportunity at this time. There's still a lot of space. There are a lot more islands and archipelagos and places where you can get lost. There's more gold as well. And so it is a better place to kind of hide from the pirate hunters that are coming out of Europe. And so this is when the book takes place in this like time where all the

pirates are feeling the squeeze after decades of being able to do what they want to do. Now, you mentioned John Connie before. What was kind of his role in this story? You gave us an overview of it before. And then more generally, what role did Native peoples along the coast play in the struggle between the pirates and the nation states? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think about this a lot because even in the modern day, when you have these colonial powers that sort of like, I guess we're in the post-colonial era, but you have these imperial powers that come into different places, the relationship with the natives is often what will determine how that goes. And if you do not have the ability to find some way to cooperate with natives, there's no way

that objectives can be met, not easily. And I think this sort of happened with the slave trade as well. Now, most people who were native to West Africa at this time, they were in a very terrible position of either you cooperate with the European slave traders or you risk being sold into the trade yourself and so many people sort of had to make this this call and a lot of people did try to resist a lot of people they they took their entire groups like entire families entire villages relocated tried to go into the interior to get away that didn't work because as more and more people fled the coast slave catchers went further into the interior to try to raid people to find to bring them to the coast and sell them and so you really had the situation where if you lived

on the coast, the only way to have a comfortable living was to find a way to not only cooperate with the European slave traders, but to find a way to beat them at their own game. And that's why John Connie is such a brilliant and interesting person, because, you know, it's hard to get into games of morality when everyone in your book is handling, is human trafficking, right? Yeah, it was tough. I will say it was tough. It's like, there's no, quote unquote, good people. No one to root for. In the course of this, it's like the only people that I felt sorry for were the people being involuntarily marched onto ships. Yeah, no, I agree. It was hard to write because, you know,

like when you first get into pirates, you're like, oh, pirates are so exciting. When I grew up, I'm going to be a pirate. And then you're like, no, pirates in West Africa did terrible things. But yeah, so John Connie is this West African king who like, just through sheer luck of when he was born, he just sees his people go through so much. He has uncles that are murdered by European slave traders who are trying to get in on the trade. And I think after having repeatedly been exposed to that many times, and then being sent up north to Fante land to learn how to fight with some of his family's friends, he comes back as this like military general, and he's a military king. And so he is really smart when it comes to tactics. He understands both African and European

tactics. He understands African and European weapons. He understands European trade. He speaks many many languages and he employs people who speak the languages that he doesn't so he really is just one of the most fascinating people you can think of because he really his he's playing like 5d chess while everyone else in the slave trade is just like barely able to play checkers and it's wild to watch him like running circles around the european slave traders as they try to find ways to either ally with him or run to him or exchange gossip with him or like just find ways to get him on their side so that he will permit them to access the Ashanti people who are really starting to become like the main empire and the main slave trading peoples in that region.

What was the system of slavery prior to the Battle of Cape Lopez? And then how did that system change in the battle's aftermath? Yeah, so when it comes to Atlantic world slavery, I think something that a lot of Americans don't know or don't get to know is that, you know, think about European slave culture. And when I say that people always kind of, they're a little bit confused. Like, what do you mean Europe didn't have slavery at this time? Not really, right? But what Europeans knew about slavery came from their history. So the Roman Empire, that was like really the last big slaving empire in Europe. And so that was the frame of reference that Europeans came into the trade with. So when they first began the slave trade,

they came to Africa, they pulled people out, they traded them into the Americas. And these are all different types of Europeans. So they brought them to all different places in the Americas. So in the French territories, the English, the Dutch, they all had different territories with different rules about what slavery looked like. And a lot of those rules were arbitrary and were sort of based on the Roman model. And under the Roman model, many people had many different experiences of enslavement. There wasn't any one particular way that slavery was, but people who were enslaved were still considered human beings under the Roman model. And I think that's like the most important takeaway, really, like people enslaved in the Roman Empire were human beings. They had a limited set of human rights and they were not perpetually enslaved. So they could and did often work their way out of enslavement. And even if they couldn't, their children were guaranteed to be free. Right. You could not be born enslaved in the Roman Empire. And so that was sort of what the agreed upon slaveries look like in the earlier years of the slave trade. Now, after the Battle of Cape Lopez, you get this narrowing

because the British win this battle. They eliminate the pirate threat virtually overnight and they end up being able to pull vast numbers of Africans out of Africa really fast. And so it exponentially grows almost overnight in the 1720s and 30s. So you get the situation where suddenly the british get to determine what slavery looks like in the british territories and in what would

become america and that's really important because the u.s had people from the netherlands from sweden from france from great britain and all of these places were like vying for what form of slavery would sort of be the most viable form but when britain takes over britain is able to ship out the vast majority of enslaved people into the colonies the american colonies and then they determined that they're going to switch to the chattel model and that's the model that pretty much every american knows about even if they haven't heard the term chattel they know what it is right they know what it looks like it looks like a cotton field right so under chattel enslavement people who are enslaved they no longer get to be human beings in the eyes of the law

so instead of being an enslaved person you become a slave legally of course not not really right? Like all humans have rights all the time. That's what our modern understanding of rights and humanity is. But back then, the understanding was that an enslaved person was no longer a person. They were a thing. And as a thing, they had no human rights. So the enslaver was the one who had all the rights. And that meant that they couldn't testify in court because things can't testify in court. It meant that they had no right to their own children because things don't have rights to their children, right? If you have a dog, you can sell those puppies away. And that is how we viewed enslavement here in this country as well and it's just such a like heinous change

that really shaped all of our culture and I really that's what I really wanted to bring home with this book if people get anything out of it I mean hopefully they'll get a really good pirate story and a naval battle because who doesn't love that but also they will get that slavery really changed something and in America we picked the most pernicious form of slavery that exists and we enslaved people in perpetuity and we kept their their descendants enslaved for generations and that really changes a culture when that becomes your main culture of labor it really changes how you see the world it changes how people see each other yeah and i will reiterate for the listeners like fascinating book you're not necessarily going to feel great

no when you get to the end of some of this but you're going to learn a lot i don't want to shift gears too abruptly on you, but as you and I were corresponding before, you mentioned that you were actually involved in delivering a portion of the CPOWER curriculum to the ROTC unit at Vanderbilt, which, you know, my experience with that course now more than 20 years ago was it was delivered by a lieutenant, typically via like an older book, using some PowerPoint presentations that had been passed along from whoever preceded the lieutenant. it. But what was that? I would imagine quite a bit has changed about that over the course of the last 20 years. What was that experience like for you? How did you get approached to do that?

And yeah, just anything that you can share about the experience of like delivering that portion of the curriculum. Yeah, no, I really loved it. So I think I mentioned before I was a military brat. So I grew up on military bases my whole life. And so I've just always felt like people who have a military cultural orientation, just get along with them better. It's easier. there's a shorthand, right? There's that third culture kid shorthand that you have immediately. And it's really easy for me to get along with other people who have experienced that life. And so I was asked to do it because I think I just, I had time and I'm a nerd for ships. Everyone knows that. Like everyone knows, I know my pirates, I know my ships, I know my naval battles.

And so at Vanderbilt, they have this wonderful policy that for any course that's co-listed with the history department, that someone with a PhD has to teach it. That's an arts and science policy, I think. And so there used to be a retired colonel. I think his name was Auer. Yeah. And he used to teach it, but then he retired. And so they were looking for someone to co-teach it with Lieutenant. And I volunteered immediately. I was like, this sounds amazing. I would love to do that. And it was really wonderful when I got to meet him. So his name was Lieutenant Reed, Dan Reed. If you're listening, shout out to you. You did an amazing job. And we basically sat down and we planned out the whole semester and we kind of picked out the topics that were most interesting

two of us. And we kind of figured out like, what is it that the ROTC program needs for these kids to have? I shouldn't say kids, right? Like these students, these serious scholars, what is it that they need to have? But then also what is it that I wish that they could know? What do I think would make their lives better and more fulfilling to know and to understand about what it is that they're about to go do? And so we really like had, had this talk and what we ended up doing is of course, every week they would get a few lectures. They would get the PowerPoints, right? We would explain the strategy, we'd explain the reasons why some wars are won and some wars are lost. But then we also had really wonderful discussions about some of the social aspects of naval warfare

and about, you know, local nationals and about what are like the historical kind of reasons for some of the conflicts that we're in today. And what I found really fascinating is that these students were, I guess it shouldn't be fascinating in retrospect, but these students were so incredibly interested in why they're being sent to the places that they were being sent. Like, why were they being deployed to the places they're being deployed to? And why certain conflicts still existed in those places? Like, why were there Somali pirates? No one had told them. And that blew my mind because I was like, how are you? You're about to be an officer in the Navy. You're possibly, some of you will be deployed to Somalia. Others of you will be

deployed to East Asia where you'll be dealing with piracy there. But you don't know why there's pirates there. Like, all right, I got this. Like, I can do this. And also just talks about how the military had handled things in the past were really interesting too. Because, you know, for example, Iraq is a really big one that we all, now that we have hindsight, we're able to look back and realize like, oh, we made some big mistakes there. And as someone who's got a military career ahead of them, there sometimes is that ambivalence, like, am I allowed to have an opinion on this if it doesn't gel with the decision at the time? Of course you are, right? Like, I think most people who are incredibly smart, multifaceted and think a lot about their jobs in the military do think

about whether past decisions were the right ones. And I think that's really important. Like you need that hindsight. You need to be able to analyze what we did, why we did it. And you need to find a way to square that with the realization that once you work for the military, your job is to follow orders. Like how do you square that? And how do you be that person for the soldiers that are under you or the sailors that are under you that have to follow your orders? And I think using that course in that way like both teaching the strategy and the history and the decisions that went into things but also being able to kind of talk through like the ethics the ramifications the historical and cultural kind of context it was a really productive and fruitful class and

i feel like i learned a lot just from the discussions that we had all right that sounds amazing and i kind of wish that you had been my instructor no like no no shots fired it's a lieutenant mike long who is an amazing instructor but yeah the the somali pirates thing was something that like i didn't fully understand until i was going through and like helping the german navy write doctrine for it right doctrine for off the but what their ships were going to be doing off the coast of somalia and yeah that was not to put too high on the point of it but that was like one of the genesis points for what we do here on the podcast was like there's all these sort of background questions that when you're involved in the doing of this stuff you don't necessarily

the doing takes so much time and energy that you don't necessarily have time to explore all that as you're doing it. So yeah, it's supposed to be a resource, but that sounds incredible. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Angela Sutton. Angela, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Yeah, thank you. So I've got a website, angelasutton.info, and then I'm on most social medias and I have the same handle. It's just D-R-Angela Sutton, like all one word, dr angela sutton dr angela sutton so i'm on x i'm on tiktok where i think i shine the most because i'm i'm just having so much fun with it like i really love making the videos and being able to

kind of like explore the bits of history that i'm not allowed to put into books or that don't really work with with the written word right some of them are just better as videos i'm on instagram as well and the thing i'm working on now is a civil war history actually which is quite a change usually historians tend to stay in the same time period so being able to jump like from the early 1700s the 1860s is quite the leap. And moving from Africa to America, also quite a leap. But I'm working on, specifically, there's this site here in Nashville. It's called Fort Negley. It was a civil war fort. What's so fascinating about this fort, though, is that it's the largest inland stone fortification of that war. And it was built in 1862 with the help of 4,933 enslaved and free

Black people who came. Many of them were like contrabands, right? Like they were running away from enslavement and sought out the military for help with that so that they could be defended from slave catchers. Other people came because they had a lot of skills to offer and they wanted fair wages for their work. And they built this really complex system of fortifications that surrounded our capital in 1862. And then the Battle of Nashville comes and it's the battle that has the largest African-American participation out of any battle in the war. And so essentially, I'm looking at, what does that mean? Like, how does, you know, like from an Atlantic world perspective, I think of this as almost a slave revolt. Like in a lot of ways, this is Black

people doing nation building. This is Black people finding ways to find new freedoms, finding ways to rebuild our country using the military. And I find that super fascinating because that's what Black people have always done. They've always used the military to expand their rights in many different ways and to expand their ability to act upon the United States and to shape us as a country. So that's where I am now. So I'm just super thrilled to be in the Civil War space because it's also a really fascinating space that I think has, there's time for a renaissance there now. There's so many new ideas coming out of it.

I love being part of it. Well, I look forward to reading it. Thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Boy, that's right, I'll put it on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm putting it on the shimbo now.