Description
Book SynopsisThis unprecedented study of nineteenth-century American merchant and whaling activity in the Indian Ocean shows how it shaped later US imperial incursions in the Pacific and Caribbean. Sailors’ journals and other primary sources reveal American influence on the period’s global commerce, illegal slaving, and environmental degradation.
Trade Review“Historian Jane Hooper concludes this engaging monograph by calling the American presence in the western Indian Ocean ‘a complicated, disorganized mess.’ Focusing on New England merchants and whalers in the southwest Indian Ocean region, the book is, nevertheless, a welcome addition to scholarship on American expansion and Indian Ocean history. Ship logbooks and journals are notoriously difficult to employ for historians unless one is looking for sailing directions and weather conditions, but by diligently teasing out meaningful snippets of information about the practical matters of American merchants and whalers, sea travel, provisioning, and slaving, and locating them in their wider nineteenth-century American cultural and expansionist context, Jane Hooper succeeds admirably.” -- Edward A. Alpers, author of The Indian Ocean in World History
“Long acknowledged but only cursorily explored, the presence of American merchants in the western Indian Ocean has finally been given its due in this fine examination of their brief but consequential maritime engagement with the islands and coasts of East Africa and Madagascar. Through an insightful use of ship logbooks and journals (among other sources), Hooper illuminates the range of ‘Yankee’ activity to make clear that ports and islands in the southwestern Indian Ocean attracted significant American investment as New England merchants sought profits in new areas between the late eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth that ranged from whaling to illegal slave trading.” -- Pedro Machado, coeditor of Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds
A clearly written and compelling read that would make a solid addition to graduate syllabi in maritime history and the histories of American empire. It is concise, accessible, and vibrant enough for undergraduate readers as well. -- Mallory Huard * H-Nationalism/H-Net *
