Revolution

Chapter 11 traces the common origins and consequences of revolutions in various regions of the Atlantic world. In Europe and much of the Americas, a new military ethic developed, promoting patriotic and loyal service and condemning mercenaries and foreign interventionists. Campaigners against the transatlantic slave trade sought to dissociate Europeans and Americans from African violence. In the Americas, revolutionary conflict fuelled racial and communal animosity. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries sensed their own moral superiority and showed contempt for their opponents. Anger, fear, and the desire for vengeance fed on each other, in some places leading to genocidal violence. In the early nineteenth century the United States condemned British aid to indigenous American warriors and expressed general opposition to European military intervention in the newly independent American republics. National and imperial policies adopted in the revolutionary era broke the early modern pattern of transatlantic war.

Horror

Chapter 7 explores how warfare affected the way rival communities across the Atlantic viewed each other. When Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans began to engage each other militarily they did not share a common, effective way of interpreting each other’s actions. The warring peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Europe had distinctive methods of sending messages through violence. On each continent, with regional variations, rituals and codes of conduct defined the terms of acceptable behavior, for example authorizing or forbidding torture, sexual violence, execution, dismemberment, the display of body parts, the killing of noncombatants, and other demonstrative acts associated with warfare. In the confusion of violent encounters myths arose that helped define and divide the peoples of the Atlantic world, promoting stereotypes and steering discriminatory patterns of behavior. In many places, misunderstandings and fears contributed to elaborately exaggerated perceptions of racial difference, encouraging animosity and pre-emptive and retributory action.

The First Phase of Atlantic Warfare, from the Fifteenth Century to 1688

Chapter 9 analyzes a pattern of warfare that developed across the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to 1688. The chapter begins in the far north of the Atlantic before proceeding to conflict along the coast of Africa and across the Atlantic world. During this period European attempts to pursue large-scale transatlantic military campaigns rarely succeeded, because expeditionary forces sent from Europe almost invariably became mired in a tangle of regional or local battles. Combatants engaged in predatory raids, retaliatory attacks, and captive-taking. Small-scale skirmishes rarely escalated into transatlantic war. Responding to local circumstances, Europeans fought against each other, exploited divisions within indigenous communities, and joined Americans and Africans in military alliances.

Ships and Military Power on Land

Chapter 4 examines amphibious operations and the impact of naval forces on the balance of military power on land. Ships were essential tools for overseas invasion, but navigational challenges limited their ability to operate safely, communicate effectively, and supply fighters on land. Military commanders launching seaborne raids, sieges, or invasions used their ships as weapons platforms, but the most important military function of ships was to transport soldiers, settlers, and supplies. Military commanders deployed ships to evacuate colonists from conquered territory and to remove war captives from the regions where they were taken. Military leaders in Africa supplying the slave trade adopted a similar logic to imperial and colonial commanders in the Americas by taking advantage of ocean-going transportation to banish their adversaries. Over the course of the early modern era mass evacuations and small-scale banishments cumulatively affected millions of people.

Sailors

Chapter 2 examines the labor required for sailing a ship across the Atlantic and the lives of sailors. Sailors were removed from their homes to live in all-male environments for months at a time. Their hours of work were unusual, with shifts relieving each other night and day. Sailors were subjected to constant supervision at sea, and poorly paid. Many were recruited as boys. Some were tricked or forced into service, and others, in poverty, enlisted out of desperation. Indigenous Americans and Africans served alongside Europeans and colonists on sailing ships. Drawing on the memoirs and experiences of individual sailors, the chapter discusses their material circumstances at sea and in port. Moving from vessel to vessel, sailors often served under a succession of different flags, fighting for various countries over their lifetimes. They developed a distinctive Atlantic culture, living and working in communities that were fragile, multilingual, and violent.

Conclusion

The conclusion contrasts Atlantic warfare in the early modern era with the pattern that developed over the course of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century Europeans and their descendants continued to dominate the ocean and, in the Americas, they increasingly achieved supremacy on land. Improved transportation, mass migration from Europe, and economic growth facilitated this change, along with a tacit agreement among national states and empires that they would not ally themselves with indigenous peoples, slaves, or maroons outside their own internationally recognized territorial boundaries. Africans relied on European firearms and became vulnerable when weapon technologies changed in the second half of the century. The violence of the early modern era laid the foundations for the racial hierarchy that was erected in the nineteenth century, but in the earlier period warfare had not divided the peoples of the Atlantic world so simply.

Combat at Sea

Chapter 3 examines combat at sea. Boarding a ship on open water was difficult, and so naval planners and officers experimented to find other means of combat. They developed a variety of incendiary weapons and introduced battle lines and signaling devices to coordinate artillery fire. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, after guns were mounted on the decks of sailing ships, ship captains strove to evade hostile fire and direct the destruction of opposing vessels from a distance. Boarding declined in the sixteenth century, but seamen continued to fight on deck to defend their ships because ships under sail could still be seized from the inside by people already on board, including crew members, captives, and guests. Throughout the early modern era, piracy, mutinies, and insurrections on slaving vessels continued to challenge the authority and interests of ship captains and the evolving norms of naval combat.

Ships

Chapter 1 analyzes military influences on the design of ships. The chapter begins with various accounts of initial indigenous American and African responses to European sailing ships. Though the reactions varied, enduring legends developed in many places associating ships with profound power. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all European sailing ships, including merchant vessels, were potential instruments of war. Endemic violence on the sea required merchants to arm themselves. Northern European sailing vessels were challenged by rowed galleys arriving from the Mediterranean, inaugurating new forms of combat at sea. To facilitate defense and for attacks on other vessels, ship designers raised and covered decks, built castles in the fore and aft, moved the rudders to the rear of the ships, dispensed with rowers, increased the size of their vessels, and eventually installed heavy guns. The chapter closes with specialization of European warships in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Warriors

Chapter 6 examines the shared experiences of communities in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, and Europe in fielding men for combat on land. After discussing the first Spanish campaigns on Hispaniola, the chapter analyzes the challenges of recruiting, training, arming, and feeding warriors, maintaining discipline, demobilizing fighting men, and coping with combat deaths. These challenges are common among all societies engaged in warfare, and they were complicated across the Atlantic world in the early modern era as long-term, long-distance military deployments placed new burdens on fighting men and their communities, straining the logistical capacities of villages and empires.

The Technology of Warfare on Land

Chapter 5 examines the weapons and logistical equipment warriors and soldiers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas deployed in warfare on land. The introduction of gunpowder weapons and the erection of new kinds of fortifications for artillery combat transformed warfare in Europe in the early modern era in a process often described as a military revolution. Nonetheless, Europeans did not possess any technological advantage in warfare in Africa or the Americas comparable to the supremacy ships gave them at sea. The chapter analyzes several technologies of war including firearms, poisoned arrows, canoes, and the use of dogs and horses in warfare.