Mutiny on the Black Prince
Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
James H. Sweet
In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued.
At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince‘s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. These private merchants used state surveillance, policing, extradition, capital punishment, international diplomacy, and even warfare in order to protect their wealth.
During an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church.
A dramatic story In its own right, Mutiny on the Black Prince makes clear how British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and led to the evolution of the modern corporate state
Published by Oxford University Press
Praise for Mutiny on the Black Prince
..looks unflinchingly at the greed, exploitation and violence that powered Britain’s immense slave trade during the eighteenth century. This important new book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how the slave trade operated and its importance for shaping global capitalism. — Nicholas Radburn, LitHub
Reconstructing a sprawling mutiny case and a West African massacre, this excellent book is an inquest into the political economy of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. It tells a compelling story with a powerful argument: merchant capitalism was a species of crime, and murder was a part of the business plan. By carefully interpreting his archival sources to connect the wrongs of the past with the inequities of the present, Sweet practices the historian’s craft at its potent best. – Vincent Brown, Author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vivid, well written, and based on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on the operations of Bristol’s slave traders. It captures the horror of the Atlantic trade and traces some of the entangled histories that brutal violence left in its wake. – Margarette Lincoln, Curator Emerita, Royal Museums Greenwich
