Here are 15 books that Jamie Sharpe & the Seas of Treachery fans have personally recommended if you like
Jamie Sharpe & the Seas of Treachery.
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My passion for tales of seafarers and Atlantic history, more generally, emerged from my own wanderlust and love of travel. I’m constantly amazed at how early modern sailors crossed the globe amidst the most pressing challenges imaginable. By reading these sailing histories, with accounts of everything from monsoons to cannibalism, we might not feel quite so inconvenienced by a short flight or train delay! During my academic career, I have had the opportunity to complete research in different parts of Britain. This experience of living transatlantically has transferred to my scholarship and outlook. I hope you find the books on my list as fun and fascinating as I have!
Jeffrey Bolster’s book is the strongest work on the experience of African American seafarers in the Age of Sail. Black seamen endured all the same forms of deprivation as European sailors. But, in a twist that I love, Bolster carefully shows how sailing was a step up for many African American men because of the horrific conditions, including enslavement, that they potentially faced on land.
In turning to the sea, “Black jacks” not only improved their lives but they also propelled the early American merchant marine. By the early nineteenth century, as Bolster documents, Black sailors composed about one-fifth of all American seafarers.
Few Americans, black or white, recognize the degree to which early African American history is a maritime history. W. Jeffrey Bolster shatters the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage. Seafaring was one of the most significant occupations among both enslaved and free black men between 1740 and 1865. Tens of thousands of black seamen sailed on lofty clippers and modest coasters. They sailed in whalers, warships, and privateers. Some were slaves, forced to work at sea, but by 1800 most were free men, seeking liberty and economic opportunity aboard ship.Bolster brings…
I wanted to go to the sea ever since I can remember. In the hope of having the nonsense knocked out of me, my father sent me at the tender age of fourteen to the ‘Indefatigable’, a tough sea-training school. This only strengthened my resolve for a life at sea, and I joined the Royal Navy at 15. My family emigrated and I transferred to the Royal Australian Navy and saw service around the world. Although I no longer have an active involvement with the navy, I sail in my imagination through my sea-faring novels.
A useful companion to Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy – my personal copy is quite well-thumbed! The book offers a definitive guide to every aspect of the handling of a man-of-war, explaining just how the ships of Nelson’s navy were actually sailed. Superb line drawings by the maritime artist Mark Myers enhance the text.
Numerous successful reprints of contemporary works on rigging and seamanship indicate the breadth of interest in the lost art of handling square-rigged ships. Model makers, marine painters, and enthusiasts need to know not only how the ships were rigged but how much sail was set in each condition of wind and sea, how the various maneuvers were carried out, and the intricacies of operations like reefing sails or 'catting' an anchor.
John Harland has provided what is undeniably the most thorough book on handling square-rigged ships. Because of his facility in a remarkable range of languages, Harland has been able…
I’m an award-winning author whose books are all set on my beautiful island of Barbados. Reading and writing have always been a part of my life and I’m obsessed with books that explore other cultures and lifestyles. There’s nothing more intoxicating than reading about new foods and new environments all interconnected by our shared humanity. They could be fantasy books with great world-building or literary fiction that explore a tiny Asian city I never heard about. All of these incredible books have influenced my writing and expanded my knowledge of the world around me.
This book was mandatory reading for most of us going to the Caribbean in secondary school.
For that reason, it may elicit a groan from those who have less than pleasant memories of school-enforced reading. But for me, it really was the first time I remember reading a book set in my home country of Barbados.
It’s a heart-warming coming-of-age story that takes you back and makes you wish for the good old days.
Nearly forty years after its initial publication, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin is considered a classic narrative of the Black colonial experience. This poetic autobiographical novel juxtaposes the undeveloped, unencumbered life of a small Caribbean island with the materialism and anxiety of the twentieth century.
Written when Lamming was twenty-three and residing in England, In the Castle of My Skin poignantly chronicles the author's life from his ninth to his nineteenth year. Through the eyes of a young boy the experiences of colonial education, class tensions, and natural disaster are interpreted and reinterpreted, mediated through the presence…
I am a professor of African history at the Royal Military College of Canada, where I teach courses on European colonialism and early and modern Africa. I earned a PhD in history from York University in Canada and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before joining RMC. My research interests include slavery, slave trade, legitimate commerce, and intercultural marriages in Luanda and its hinterland. I have published articles and book chapters and co-edited (with Paul E. Lovejoy) Slavery, Memory and Citizenship. My first book, Slave Trade and Abolition was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in January 2021.
In this book, Roquinaldo A. Ferreira traces the trajectory of free and enslaved individuals directly and indirectly connected to the slave trade from Angola in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at the life stories of merchants and ordinary men and women in the ports of Luanda and Benguela he reveals the movements of peoples, ideas, capital, cultural practices, and commodities that shaped the South Atlantic World. Ferreira also demonstrates that the Portuguese incorporated indigenous institutions and cultural practices evidencing that cultural exchanges worked both ways. The book is a fine example of the use of microhistory to recover the experiences of subaltern individuals, including the enslaved, women, and criminals.
This book argues that Angola and Brazil were connected, not separated, by the Atlantic Ocean. Roquinaldo Ferreira focuses on the cultural, religious and social impacts of the slave trade on Angola. Reconstructing biographies of Africans and merchants, he demonstrates how cross-cultural trade, identity formation, religious ties and resistance to slaving were central to the formation of the Atlantic world. By adding to our knowledge of the slaving process, the book powerfully illustrates how Atlantic slaving transformed key African institutions, such as local regimes of forced labor that predated and coexisted with Atlantic slaving and made them fundamental features of the…
Nancy Blanton is an American author of Irish descent. A former journalist, she’s written four award-winning novels rooted in 17th century Irish history. Her first novel, Sharavogue, takes place in the lawless West Indies on the island of Montserrat, where the protagonist struggles to survive the slavery, disease, kindness, and brutality of an Irish-owned sugar plantation.
For perhaps 200 years after 1650, sugar became such a valuable commodity it became known as “white gold.” This book gives the broad and sweeping history of the conflicts over control of the sugar trade, the slave trade, and the wealth that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution. It also provides intimate details of the families whose fortunes depended on sugar.
For 200 years after 1650 the West Indies were the most fought-over colonies in the world, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar - a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold.
Young men, beset by death and disease, an ocean away from the moral anchors of life in Britain, created immense dynastic wealth but produced a society poisoned by war, sickness, cruelty and corruption.
The Sugar Barons explores the lives and experiences of those whose fortunes rose and fell with the West Indian empire. From the ambitious and brilliant entrepreneurs, to…
I have always had a lifelong passion for all things maritime. In the early 1980s, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean as a crew companion to the late famous Captain Ted Falcon Barker, author of The Devil’s Gold. The expedition made landfall in the Bahamas, so this area became a focus of fascination. I also have a very strong historical sense, reflected in my poetry and two of my other works of fiction, the novels Charity Amour and No Gentle Bondage.
Michener’s work is an historical panorama, embracing pre-Columbian history, the colonial era – including piracy, right up to the rise of Fidel Castro’s regime. ‘No holds barred.' An absolute ‘must’ for anyone wanting a full background perspective. I found this a fantastic broadener of my horizons.
In this acclaimed classic novel, James A. Michener sweeps readers off to the Caribbean, bringing to life the eternal allure and tumultuous history of this glittering string of islands. From the 1310 conquest of the Arawaks by cannibals to the decline of the Mayan empire, from Columbus’s arrival to buccaneer Henry Morgan’s notorious reign, from the bloody slave revolt on Haiti to the rise of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Caribbean packs seven hundred dramatic years into a tale teeming with revolution and romance, authentic characters and thunderous destinies. Through absorbing, magnificent prose, Michener captures the essence of the islands in all…
This is and will remain the example of historical research made by one of the leading authorities in the field of Atlantic history. Elliott’s book set the agenda by investigating and assessing the complex array of causes and consequences which brought England and Spain to have an ever-lasting cultural, economic, political, and religious influence on the history of North America and Latin America.
This book tells the story of the Irish migrants who settled on the island of Montserrat from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Through a masterful combination of different sources, Akenson reconstructs the colonial world of the Irish, and their ambitions to become rulers and no longer ruled within the lucrative and unruly context of the Caribbean.
Montserrat, although part of England's empire, was settled largely by the Irish and provides an opportunity to view the interaction of Irish emigrants with English imperialism in a situation where the Irish were not a small minority among white settlers. Within this context Akenson explores whether Irish imperialism on Montserrat differed from English imperialism in other colonies. Akenson reveals that the Irish proved to be as effective and as unfeeling colonists as the English and the Scottish, despite the long history of oppression in Ireland. He debunks the myth of the "nice" slave holder and the view that indentured labour…
I’ve been fascinated by the Atlantic slave trade since 2007, when I first studied the business papers of a Liverpool merchant who had enslaved over a hundred thousand people. I was immediately struck by the coldness of the merchant’s accounts. I was also drawn to the ways in which the merchant’s profit-motivated decisions shaped the forced migrations and experiences of their victims. I have subsequently extended my research to examine slave traders across the vastness of the Atlantic World. I'm also interested in the ways that the slave trade’s history continues to shape the modern world, from the making of uneven patterns of global economic development to such diverse areas as the financing of popular music.
When I started researching the slave trade in the mid-2000s, there wasn’t a great deal of historical work that examined the realities of the trade for its enslaved victims, nor the merchants who organized it.
I therefore had to turn to Barry Unsworth’s exceptional 1993 novel Sacred Hunger, to gain insight into the slave trade’s gruesome realities. Unsworth undertook deep historical research before writing Sacred Hunger, which examines the fictional slaving voyage of the Liverpool Merchant.
The novel vividly exposes the violence, misery, and death that was at the trade’s core, as well as enslaved people’s constant attempts to resist their captivity. He also paints an accurate portrait of slaving merchants’ chilling rationality and “Sacred Hunger” for personal profit, regardless of what achieving that ambition costs in human lives.
Liverpool, 1752. William Kemp has lost a fortune in cotton speculation, and must recoup his losses if his son is to marry the wealthy woman whom he loves. His last resort is a slave ship, one that will take him to the Guinea coast, where he will trade for human cargo, then embark on the infamous Middle Passage. When disease ravages the ship and the African prisoners mutiny, William’s profit-seeking venture falls apart. Slaves and sailors alike will join together to found a utopian community on the coast of Florida—not knowing that the vengeful, younger…
I'm a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade who was trained with a PhD in History and a PhD in Art History, and who's interested in how slavery is memorialized in the public space as well as in the visual and material culture of slavery. I was born and raised in Brazil, the country where the largest number of enslaved Africans were introduced in the era of the Atlantic slave trade and that still today is the country with the largest Black population after Nigeria, the most populous African country. I believe that studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery helps us to remedy the legacies of anti-Black racism today.
The Art of Conversion by art historian Cécile Fromont provides us with a rich overview of visual images and material objects witnessing the first contacts between African men and women in the Kingdom of Kongo and European conquerors and missionaries starting in the late fifteenth century.
Richly illustrated with color images of paintings, objects, and artifacts of Christian devotion, this book shows how these early encounters that led to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade in the region of present-day Angola in West Central Africa were marked by the mutual exchanges of valuable objects.
These exchanges were also immortalized in paintings, watercolors, and engravings that help us to understand these first encounters between Africans and Europeans that were so important for the development of the trade in enslaved Africans.
I'm a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade who was trained with a PhD in History and a PhD in Art History, and who's interested in how slavery is memorialized in the public space as well as in the visual and material culture of slavery. I was born and raised in Brazil, the country where the largest number of enslaved Africans were introduced in the era of the Atlantic slave trade and that still today is the country with the largest Black population after Nigeria, the most populous African country. I believe that studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery helps us to remedy the legacies of anti-Black racism today.
Toby Green’s book is a magisterial history of West Africa and West Central Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
Exploring a large array of sources from three continents the book tells the history of African societies such as the kingdoms of Kongo and Dahomey, by showing how Africa was connected to the rest of the world earlier before Europeans reached the Atlantic coasts of the continent.
With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade Africa exported currencies such as gold, whose great value persisted over time, but kept importing cloth, cowries, iron, and copper, whose value decreased over time.
The book helps us to understand the roots of the inequalities among Africa and the Global North and shows us that these unbalanced economic and diplomatic exchanges were tied to cultural, religious, and artistic dimensions, in which material culture also played a central role.
By the time the "Scramble for Africa" among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies-most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing…
