Kevin P. McDonald

Loyola Marymount University, History, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

Address: Department of History
Loyola Marymount University
1 LMU Drive, University Hall Suite 3500
Los Angeles, CA 90045

less

InterestsView All (13)

Uploads

Papers by Kevin P. McDonald

McDonald Review of Reeder, Smugglers, Pirates and Patriots, WMQ, April 2020

William and Mary Quarterly, 2020

Download

McDonald CV

Download

"Thomas Tew and Pirate Settlements of the Indo-Atlantic Trade World" (2005)

Through a social biographical approach to an Anglo-American pirate, Thomas Tew, this paper attemp... more Through a social biographical approach to an Anglo-American pirate, Thomas Tew, this paper attempts to situate pirates and piracy in their proper historical contexts, to demonstrate that the definition of "pirate" was an unstable and continually shifting category, and to establish that many pirates operated within cultural and social norms. The research presented here reveals how the sinews of empire were constructed from above by ruling elites, from below by colonial merchants and seamen, and from beyond by entities outside the control of the metropole, exposing the general processes and contested means by which the economic, social, and cultural frameworks of empire were formulated. Furthermore, juxtaposing North American colonies with settlements on Madagascar reveals the complex workings in multiple directions of early modern colonizing projects, and provides a comparative trans-regional perspective on the traditional exceptionalist narrative of early America. Finally, this paper attempts to remedy a gap in the scholarship between scholars of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, exposing some early modern interactions between these regions by tracking pirate settlements, their inhabitants and their sponsors over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Download

Books by Kevin P. McDonald

Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from ... more In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks.

Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.