Seafaring Slaves Chapter Summary

Seafaring Slaves and Their Freedom Slaves have been the cornerstones of western civilization since the middle age. During the gory chapter of the Indo-Atlantic world, there were numerous stories of the seafaring slaves. Despite the uncultured savage background of all of these slaves, some of them played crucial parts in the global trading network at the time. In Chapter 5 of McDonald’s book Pirates, Merchants, Settlers and Slaves, the author Kevin McDonald depicted the accounts of several extremely skilled seafaring slaves, and how they managed to achieve freedom through their involvement in the global oceanic commodity trading. McDonald started the chapter with the account of Calico Jack, a “runaway slave” who “reveals a number of surprising facts of a global trade network”. (McDonald 99) Later he uses more case studies such as Thom Hicks, Marramitta the Cook, Nicholas Cartagena to further demonstrate the surprising roles these slaves played during the 1700s. The author argues that many of these slaves managed to redeem their freedom through …show more content…
The author demonstrates that some of the slaves are involved in the Indo-Atlantic trade not as commodities but as critical components of the functioning system. The chapter also gives us a different look at the VOC and EIC, as they are the crucial parts of the same trading network at similar time period. In different reading materials, we learn the way these companies function, and in this chapter, the author provides us with more first hand accounts of merchants conducting their individual business under the oversight of these great power. The context provides us with some different perspectives when we try to study the development of oceans and empires. The common conception of slaves in the medieval trading has always been that slaves are the commodities while the author suggests otherwise in this