I’ve been reading a lot. I bought like 30 books about pirates and have read books about the history of the West Indies. Some may seem repetitive, but each one brings up something new or adds a different perceptive.
Speaking of perspective…
I tweeted about this a few days ago and I would like to elaborate on the question: Where the 18th-century pirates racist or anti-racist?
Several sources (books and also the Whydah Exhibition museum) discuss racism and 18th-century pirates. Some, like the Whydah museum, emphasize pirates freeing slaves and having men of color serve in leadership roles. Others, like Under the Black Flag, acknowledge pirates freed slaves but explain pirates also sold slaves and sometimes forced men of color to “go on the account.”
So… were they racist or not?
The short answer: Neither. They were mostly just opportunists who were tired of being treated like crap and not making any money.
The long answer: It’s impossible to say because racism, as it’s defined today, did not exist in the Golden Age of Piracy (1715-1725).
Context is always important, but it’s especially important when analyzing history. Because cultures, words, meanings, etc., evolve over time. Something we say today may not have been used three centuries ago. So while we can perhaps equate our definitions of a newer term to a way society functioned back then, it requires much more nuance and thought.
The 1700s is an incredibly important time period, and the Caribbean is probably the most important place in the world because of its role during the “age of exploration.” Because the Caribbean was so vital in so many ways, there are a lot of intertwining elements. And it gets complicated.
Here is the simplified context:
There was discrimination in the 1700s, and earlier. But it was religious discrimination, which sailed out of Europe and into the Caribbean, where Europeans brought their battles. (The Caribbean was essentially a war ground for European cultures, especially since the Spanish thought non-Catholics were heathens and the British were full into protestants)
Discrimination wasn’t centered around the color of your skin, just on your religion. So indigenous cultures may have been seen as less-than because of their religious practices and not necessarily their skin color (like the Mayan sacrifices).
In this sense, the pirates were fair. They didn’t care about your national origin, political leanings or religion. So yes, they were much more accepting and welcoming than the “civilized” European societies at the time.
So there was discrimination. And there was slavery. How is that different from our definition of racism today?
As I mentioned above, the Caribbean was critical in world globalization. (You could trace the American Revolution to the colonization of the Caribbean if you were so inclined to.) There were many elements that led to the use of only African slaves.
- Europeans brought indentured servants to work on Caribbean plantations
- They participated in the slave trade because Europe loved its capitalism and would do anything to make money.
- They brought African slaves to the Caribbean
- The indentured servants could not handle the Caribbean climate, and a lot of them died from tropical disease. They either died or their servitude term ended.
- Which left the Europeans with a shortage of labor
- Europeans discovered that Africans handed the climate much better and died less frequently than European indentured servants
- So they intensely turned to African slavery
Much was happening in the Caribbean at the time, like the discovery of tobacco. But one other export became crucial: SUGAR
- Sugar became a status symbol for the wealthy and was purely a luxury good. It yielded a tremendous profit.
- But it was also a very labor-intensive crop to harvest, so Europeans used African slaves, less likely to die than indentured servants, for this task
- To summarize: Sugar was profitable, European servants couldn’t stay alive long enough to harvest it but the African slaves could.
- So: Demand for money and sugar –> Reliance on African slaves
In the latter half of the 18th century:
- The morality of slavery was being questioned
- Plantation owners still wanted to make money of free labor – especially at the very profitable but labor-intensive sugar plantations.
- So they started coming up with lies and myths to justify enslaving, especially, Africans.
- This is when the racism we see today began to develop; slavery defenders claimed Africans were built for this labor, that they were inferior people, that they needed to be looked after, etc.
And that’s how we got racism as we define it today.
I’m not trying to claim that pirates were anti-discriminatory or were discriminatory. I just want to emphasize the importance of context when it comes to history.
You can’t say pirates were racist but you also can’t say they weren’t racist, because that kind of racism didn’t exist back then.
And ultimately, these people have all been dead for three centuries and written accounts of their behavior only exist from witnesses who had their own biases. So, we will never truly know.
(If any of this was unclear, please reach out to me and I will edit to make it clearer!)
Sources:
Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly
Exhibition Whydah Museum
Under the Black 