“For merchants and sailors alike in the Atlantic system”, James Sweet writes in Mutiny on the Black Prince, “political freedom was seamlessly reduced to individual economic ambition and greed” (p. 93). This is more accurate as an assessment of what the book does than of historical reality. If the titular 1768 mutiny, its subsequent international manhunt, and decades of revolution, are not “seams”, I am unsure what is. Sweet’s reconstruction of this maritime revolt is detailed and effective archival work that will prove a boon to scholars and non-academic readers alike. But his analysis is a disservice to his subjects and a disappointment for historians.
In the short introduction, readers meet slave traders John Fowler and James Laroche and receive a brisk and effective survey of both sailor politics and the slave trade. Sweet promises to shed new light on the rise of “corporate power” (p. 7), including with a much-needed shift of debates about slavery and capitalism from nineteenth-century American cotton to eighteenth-century Atlantic sugar. He insightfully observes that James Laroche “seemed to view his mercantile business as just another means of conducting politics” (p. 12) and brings welcome clarity to what that business and political conduct looked like.
Unfortunately, Sweet frequently portrays politics as just another means of conducting business. In the second chapter, he writes movingly and sympathetically of the plight of individual sailors, particularly the desperate men who worked aboard slave ships, but proves unable to see them as anything more. Sweet uses the breakdown of a Thames strike in 1768, in which sailors who went on strike with coal heavers ultimately performed scab labour to replace the latter, as evidence that “sailors were ultimately not all that different from upwardly mobile merchants like John Fowler. Like him, they aspired to achieve greater individual economic freedom, and they were willing to do whatever it took to realize that goal” (p. 39).
Maritime historians have advanced numerous complex explanations for the politics of sailors, from proto-Marxist class consciousness to ideological conservatism and practicality. Sweet’s psychological egoism and atomizing approach instead flattens sailors into self-interested individuals. That same approach to understanding other human beings became popular among eighteenth-century British elites – such as Laroche’s Antiguan planter contemporary Samuel Martin – because this flattening was a useful way to defend the indefensible. Its frequent and unexamined appearance in a book concerned with the relationship between liberalism and imperial commerce is therefore both odd and unhelpful. Methodological individualism and narrow Lockean self-interest keep Sweet from developing much more interesting lines of argument on the role of nationality (the coal heavers were “mostly Irish” (p. 37)) or gender (he writes of sailor conflicts with prostitutes) in limiting class solidarity. Sweet’s dismissal of collective worker endeavour suggests not so much the typical ideological commitment to “individualism” as a lack of imagination.
This pattern mars even the middle chapters’ strong narrative reconstructions. Here, Sweet offers compelling portraits of actors including Willie Honesty, a regional power player in Old Calabar, and the Egboshery marines who guarded slave ships there. The subsequent portrait of the mutiny itself is gripping and detailed. But again, Sweet’s flattening and conflation sabotage his analysis. When he interpolates eighteenth-century minds, Sweet almost exclusively finds “individual” motives. The mutineers were all driven by “individual ambition” (p. 81) and “aspiring to be the next merchant king” (p. 148). Sweet is less reductive on the motivations that led African mutineer Phillip Thompson to leave his anticolonial home of Ano Bom, but still asserts his “ambition” for “individual power” (p. 92). Pirates “merely followed the patterns of criminal evasion modeled by their merchant masters” (p. 95).
Sweet’s assertion of sailor greed is but one manifestation of a problem that plagues the entire monograph: a tendency to conflate where he should connect or compare. At the paragraph, chapter, and book level, Sweet repeatedly begins by identifying links between two distinct concepts, then indicates that they are similar, and soon concludes that they are the same. A promising analysis of “walking the plank” and the Zong case becomes the literally and analytically inaccurate claim that slavery and piracy “were synonymous” (p. 98). Links between private guilds and political interests lead to the unhelpful assertion that “increasingly, private corporate interests and those of the state were imperceptible” (p. 118). Merchants, including James Laroche specifically, were not merely powerful actors within government; they “were the state itself”, apparently. With every such conflation, Sweet not only elides key dynamics in the interface between his two objects of analysis, but he also renders analysis impossible by erasing that interface altogether. If merchants “were the state itself” (p. 118), there is little else to be said about their interactions with it.
This particular claim is part of Sweet’s overarching argument that the British state was becoming a “corporate oligarchy” in this era – an argument that includes severe misreadings of British law and politics. The High Court of Admiralty’s decision to delay proceedings while a witness for the prosecution was at sea, and given Fowler had paid the witness’s expenses, was neither “remarkabl[e]” (p. 115) nor evidence that “the Court ceded prosecutorial authority” (p. 116) to Fowler, because the state did not have that authority to cede. Here, as in nearly all English criminal cases prior to the nineteenth century, the “prosecutor” was the wronged party acting as a private individual. Likewise, the ethics and evidence norms surrounding witnesses that Sweet implies were broken did not yet exist. What Sweet reads as new and expanding cessions of early modern state power were in fact old and receding limits.
Sweet’s chapter on the pursuit of the mutineers, “Liberty?”, casts Fowler’s prosecution as emblematic of a “capture of state power” that “amounted to a shadow revolution that ultimately framed liberty as corporate oligarchy, marking an insidious new political power in the Atlantic world” (p. 119). But Sweet offers no evidence that his elite actors either conceived of or presented themselves as agents of “liberty”. John Fowler invoked rights, rules, laws, and property – but not liberty. There is plenty to say about the contradictions of eighteenth-century liberty, but because Sweet’s contradictions are merely the product of conflation, they preclude rather than invite analysis.
At the close of Chapter Six, Sweet remarks that the mutineers “defined their newfound liberty within the very structures of the mercantile state they sought to challenge” (p. 117). What else could they have defined it within? The mutineers’ decision to hold elections “demonstrated a democratic impulse”, but also supposedly “replicated the very hierarchies of power they intended to topple” (p. 80), since they merely introduced democracy while preserving the office of captain. In Sweet’s interpretation, this meant the mutineers “could not imagine any other form of shipboard governance” (p. 80) – as if imagining were the only barrier to alternatives. While he recognizes the “egalitarian[ism]” and “radical vision” (p. 91) of Henry Beach, whom the mutineers elected as captain, Sweet repeatedly characterizes the crew’s politics and values instead through the actions of Thomas Austin, the minority candidate who violently overthrew Beach and then stole the ship. When sailor George Greery sacrifices his life to protect his fellow mutineers rather than betray them in court, Sweet can only leave his altruism as a brief and unexamined narrative detail. Seemingly in search of an acausal and forensic liberty, Sweet misses the very real, historically situated one before him. This is particularly disappointing for scholarship on Atlantic slavery, which has for decades criticized frameworks of individual agency and narrow resistance, and theorized beyond both.
The book concludes with confused pleas for complexity. Sweet saves his most galling equivalence for the penultimate chapter’s end, where he claims that “reducing John Fowler to ‘slave trader’ is no more edifying than reducing Willie Honesty or the Egboshery marines to ‘slaves’” (p. 151). Mutiny reduces all of its subjects to profit-seeking individuals. It insists that James Laroche was more than a slave trader, but that mutineers were something less than rebels. In a conclusion on present-day accountability efforts, Sweet scolds Black Lives Matter protesters for tearing down the Bristol statue of Edward Colston, who was only indirectly involved in the slave trade, as he believes “efforts to denounce Colston have obscured the deeper, more systematic” profiteering of men like Fowler (p. 156). This comes across as chiding protesters for not writing a monograph, and both the framing of the book and the content of Sweet’s related 2023 American Historical Association address suggest Black Lives Matter efforts to denounce Colston are part of the reason this book, revealing these deeper dimensions, exists at all; certainly they have ensured it will get greater attention.
James Sweet’s itemized accounting of the afterlives of the slave trade could, as he suggests, prove useful in a reparations effort. But no reparative project is possible without collective effort – something Sweet alternately misreads and dismisses in both the past and the present. Tellingly, Sweet has more praise for a memorial exhibit at Bristol Cathedral than he does for the protesters outside in the streets demanding change. On one of the few occasions where Sweet reads anything but “individual” self-interest into sailor action, he commends Phillip Thompson for giving us “different ways of imagining the histories of the Atlantic world – not as individualist, accumulative, and driven by greed, but rather as collective, distributive, and driven by reciprocal obligations” (p. 92). It is a shame that Mutiny on the Black Prince exclusively reflects the former way of imagining.
