In his latest work, Miles Ogborn has composed a richly layered and analytically controlled survey of Britain's expanding global presence in the early modern period. The book's chief strength lies in Ogborn's ability to filter the forces of world history through the experiences of forty-two diverse and compelling individuals who, to varying degrees, helped to shape that history. (Of these, eight are women; fifteen are people of color.) In some cases these people represent thousands, at times millions, of others in like circumstances. But they also stand on their own; the lives Ogborn depicts are no mere types. His brief and sensitively drawn “biographical sketches,” around which each chapter is organized, succeed in animating his subjects, tracing their mental landscapes and identifying their motives, ambivalences, vulnerabilities, losses, and occasional successes. His study captures the distinctly local qualities of the spaces through which these persons and their capital, goods, and ideas circulated.
Ogborn addresses his book to those “considering Britain's changing place in an early modern world for the first time” (14). Still, many of the people he treats will be familiar to his readers: Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I, Pocahontas, and Captain James Cook. Others, such as Anne Bonny, Tupaia, Radhakanta Tarkavagisa, Ancona Robin Robin John, and Essa Morrison, will be unknown to most. Ogborn eschews biographical hierarchy: diversity and parity govern his choices. Famously larger-than-life figures are brought down to size and humanized; they receive the same allotment of space as those whose stories have traditionally been overlooked.
Aside from a chapter on British expansion in India before 1800 and a final chapter on Cook's three voyages to the Pacific, Global Lives is manifestly a book about the Atlantic world. Each chapter explores a particular process at work there: the public-private partnerships of Elizabethan exploration, white settlement in North America, transatlantic trade, maritime labor, and maritime violence. Ogborn's work culminates in three chapters on unfreedom in the Atlantic world: the slave trade, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and resistance. His most powerful units have their basis in issues of labor, production, and commerce.
Ogborn's major claims about Britain's early modern empire do not break new ground but rather distill the consensus of leading historians of the past two decades. His chapters thus portray the projection of British power in the early modern world as fragile, contingent, partial, and contested. Britons relied upon negotiation and pragmatic alliances—not swagger or self-assertion—with savvy rulers and intermediaries in North America, West Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific in order to survive and thrive in their ventures. And yet, over this period, Britain became central to global history. Indeed, by the end of his story, its empire largely defined what global history is.
Nibbling at the edges of Iberian power in the Elizabethan era, Britain by 1800 counted itself as the world's largest seaborne empire. This transformation worked in two apparently contradictory ways. Britain's initial reliance on private forms of plunder, terror, and violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to carve out space for its interests fell in the eighteenth century under the official control of the state. Pirate adventurers, once glorified, became hunted outlaws. In the world of commerce, however, the state retreated, shedding its chartered monopolies for privately driven markets. Even slaves helped this process along, Ogborn contends, since their cultivation of “provision grounds” introduced a notion of free enterprise into the Caribbean's plantation economy (248). As Britain's overseas enterprises were regularized and integrated, we are told, “there was no overall scheme or plan, but a new world got built” (332).
Global Lives privileges human agency in a world of limits. (Many of Ogborn's cultural border crossers resonate closely with Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh, William Dalrymple's James Kirkpatrick, and Simon Schama's John Clarkson.) Ogborn consistently focuses on the problems and opportunities that prompt his subjects to act: sometimes freely, sometimes under coercion, but mainly on the border between the two. Those in search of clear-cut heroes and scoundrels or absolute winners and losers will come away disappointed. At times his subjects’ decisions grip the reader with their understated power, as when down-and-out merchant Archibald Dalziel confides from the Gold Coast to his brother, “I have at last come a little into the spirit of the slave trade and must own (perhaps it ought to be my shame) that I can now traffick in that way without remorse” (207).
While Ogborn has digested much primary and secondary source material, the restraint he exercises lends his details weight. He illuminates the drudgery and danger entailed in the seafaring life when he writes that sailors who worked on deck by day and slept by night were known to their shipmates as “idlers” (147). His aside that the conservative Whig and abolitionist Hannah More named her pet cats “Passive Obedience” and “Non-Resistance” exposes an underappreciated dimension of her character (276). Some arresting metaphors reframe familiar institutions in fresh ways. The ship of the line and the plantation were “the most complex machines” of their age (237). Ogborn defines the latter as “part farm, part factory, part prison camp and part country house estate” (233). The British navy, in the eighteenth century, was “by far the largest industrial organization in the Western world” (143).
This work delivers its small share of frustrations. Ogborn tends to overlook religion as a motor of human action; material self-interest generally predominates. His account of Britain's imperial evolution requires more consistent comparison with neighboring states and empires to put its shifting impact into perspective. His spare use of references, while understandable for his genre, nevertheless leads to some unaccountable lapses (156, 223). Ogborn also does not adequately explain why he leaves certain places out: the Mediterranean, North Africa, northern Europe, and East Asia all come to mind. Missing, too, are examples of imperial disintegration, most obviously the American War of Independence and its displacement of loyal British subjects. These minor problems scarcely detract, however, from the many pleasures and insightful connections to be found in this vibrant synthesis of macro- and microhistory.
