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bloodygranuaileAccording to my records I had already read Thomas M. Truxes’ Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, but I absolutely do not have any memory of reading the entire thing, and I do have what might be false memories of reading only selected chapters as assigned in my Pirates and Smuggling in the Atlantic class, back in 2009 or whenever the hell I was in college (help, I’m old). My professor for that class, Wim Klooster, is cited in the acknowledgements for this book, which is perhaps why all of us had to go out and buy it. That sounds cynical but is not actually a complaint; that was one of my favorite classes and I got to write a really fun paper on rum-running for it.
Anyway. Defying Empire is definitely an academic rather than a journalistic read and as such feels a little drier than a book about smuggling and defying empire (and water, heh heh, sorry I’ll see myself out) ought to be. On the other hand, the subject matter, while classed under the sexy term “smuggling,” is largely just a bunch of rich merchants falsifying paperwork, and “falsifying paperwork” can only carry so much drama on its own. There are however also a lot of ship captures and that ought to be Fun And Exciting; alas, one must sub in one’s own pre-existing mental footage of eighteenth-century boat chases since the captures themselves are heavy on “who was captured and what they had in the hold at the time” and light on the details of the battles. Nevertheless, while it doesn’t make much of an adventure novel, if you are interested in How Colonialism Works it offers some interesting light into the contradictions of mercantilist economics.
All that said, I did find the subject matter here very interesting! It specifically focuses on the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, and the various ways in which merchants in New York and surrounding ports managed to keep regular business going, directly or indirectly, with the French, with whom they could get pretty good prices, instead of patriotically allowing themselves to get fucked over by only trading with the British, who necessarily needed the Crown to be the ones to make the profit off the trades and not the merchants. Also, the people wanted sugar, dammit. It’s not really the kind of story that has good guys but it was sort of satisfying seeing the Crown, having set up all these guys as British citizens for the purpose of doing trading, be all “no, not like that” when they insisted upon exercising their liberties as British citizens to do trading. Like all American history it makes me wonder what the world would look like if the British and French empires had ground each other down to attrition and the “Indians” had reconquered North America, but alas, I don’t think that was ever going to happen.
There is a sort of plotline, or at least recurring figures, surrounding a whiny failed wine merchant who decides to turn informer for the Crown about all these rich guys breaking the trade laws, and has a very bad time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic to inform to who will take him seriously. He is almost killed in a riot instigated by the rich guys he’s accusing and spends quite a while in jail, at the center of a whirl of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, while Crown forces struggle to install some people into the New York administration who will crack down on trading with the enemy. It really highlights how small and incestuous the old New York power elite was, but eventually two merchants are publicly tried for smuggling, where their main defense is that they are being unfairly singled out for punishment because, like, everyone is doing it, man.
Overall I did find this a really intriguing and informative look into a very specific aspect of pre-Revolutionary America, and the workings and contradictions of the British empire at this time. I’m definitely keeping the book around as a future writing resource in case I ever get back to writing silly piratey historical fiction, because it has a lot of really solid information about smuggling practices and popular semi-legal trading ports.
Anyway. Defying Empire is definitely an academic rather than a journalistic read and as such feels a little drier than a book about smuggling and defying empire (and water, heh heh, sorry I’ll see myself out) ought to be. On the other hand, the subject matter, while classed under the sexy term “smuggling,” is largely just a bunch of rich merchants falsifying paperwork, and “falsifying paperwork” can only carry so much drama on its own. There are however also a lot of ship captures and that ought to be Fun And Exciting; alas, one must sub in one’s own pre-existing mental footage of eighteenth-century boat chases since the captures themselves are heavy on “who was captured and what they had in the hold at the time” and light on the details of the battles. Nevertheless, while it doesn’t make much of an adventure novel, if you are interested in How Colonialism Works it offers some interesting light into the contradictions of mercantilist economics.
All that said, I did find the subject matter here very interesting! It specifically focuses on the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, and the various ways in which merchants in New York and surrounding ports managed to keep regular business going, directly or indirectly, with the French, with whom they could get pretty good prices, instead of patriotically allowing themselves to get fucked over by only trading with the British, who necessarily needed the Crown to be the ones to make the profit off the trades and not the merchants. Also, the people wanted sugar, dammit. It’s not really the kind of story that has good guys but it was sort of satisfying seeing the Crown, having set up all these guys as British citizens for the purpose of doing trading, be all “no, not like that” when they insisted upon exercising their liberties as British citizens to do trading. Like all American history it makes me wonder what the world would look like if the British and French empires had ground each other down to attrition and the “Indians” had reconquered North America, but alas, I don’t think that was ever going to happen.
There is a sort of plotline, or at least recurring figures, surrounding a whiny failed wine merchant who decides to turn informer for the Crown about all these rich guys breaking the trade laws, and has a very bad time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic to inform to who will take him seriously. He is almost killed in a riot instigated by the rich guys he’s accusing and spends quite a while in jail, at the center of a whirl of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, while Crown forces struggle to install some people into the New York administration who will crack down on trading with the enemy. It really highlights how small and incestuous the old New York power elite was, but eventually two merchants are publicly tried for smuggling, where their main defense is that they are being unfairly singled out for punishment because, like, everyone is doing it, man.
Overall I did find this a really intriguing and informative look into a very specific aspect of pre-Revolutionary America, and the workings and contradictions of the British empire at this time. I’m definitely keeping the book around as a future writing resource in case I ever get back to writing silly piratey historical fiction, because it has a lot of really solid information about smuggling practices and popular semi-legal trading ports.