It is not known when this technique was invented. Almost certainly it was not discovered by a single inspired dyer, but rather it evolved over centuries of experimentation. By 327 BCE, when Alexander the Great launched his campaign into the subcontinent, the dyed cotton fabrics were so conspicuous that several of his generals featured them prominently in their accounts of the campaign. “There were in India trees bearing, as it were, flocks or bunches of wool,” the Greek historian Strabo recounted, quoting the generals. “The linen made by them from this substance was finer and whiter than any other . . . The country produces colours of great beauty.”
As Alexander’s forces returned from India with word of this miraculous fabric, they helped initiate an obsession with Indian cotton that would ultimately wrap itself around the globe. That obsession arose from the confluence of three properties: the fabrics were soft; they could be dyed with vibrant patterns; and those patterns could be washed without losing color. No fabric in human history had combined those properties into a single cloth. Over the two millennia that separate Alexander’s invasion and the battle between the Fancy and the treasure fleet, many fortunes were made unearthing and trading rare metals, or growing and selling valuable foodstuffs like sugar and pepper. But no product of art and manufacture during that period generated as much profit as the dyed cotton fabrics of India.
While India was a defining force in global trade from Roman times all the way into the age of exploration, India itself had only a marginal role in moving its product around the world. The historian Strabo recorded that 120 Roman ships a year, manned by Egyptian Greeks, would sail to India’s southwest coast to trade silver and gold for cotton, jewelry, and spices. By the end of the millennium, that shipping network would be run almost exclusively by Muslim traders. The result was a geoeconomic system in which an artisanal Hindu society produced valuable goods, while surrounded by a membrane of Islamic merchants and sailors concentrated in the harbor cities that allowed those goods to circulate on the world market.
The question of why India itself never developed its own trade networks leads to one of the great “what if” thought experiments of global history. Had the subcontinent’s combination of immense natural resources and technical ingenuity been matched with an equivalent appetite for seafaring trade, it is not hard to imagine India following the path to industrialization and global dominance before England made its great leap forward economically in the 1700s. One explanation for India’s reluctance to trade lies in the Hindu prohibition against oceanic travel. According to the Baudhayana sutra, anyone “making voyages by sea” would lose their status in the caste system, a punishment that could only be absolved through an elaborate form of penance: “They shall eat every fourth mealtime a little food, bathe at the time of the three libations (morning, noon and evening), passing the day standing and the night sitting. After the lapse of three years, they throw off their guilt.” The prohibition itself took only a few lines to spell out, but it cast a long shadow.
Some historians have argued that—prohibitions notwithstanding—India in the first centuries of the Common Era had more nautical expertise than the conventional historical account would have it. But for whatever reason, by the end of the first millennium CE, Muslim trading fleets had swooped in to dominate the flow of goods in and out of the subcontinent. Islam, in those early years, was as extroverted in its attitude toward commerce as India was introverted. Muhammad had been a trader, and his disciples recognized early on that selling people much-coveted products was a particularly effective way to start relationships that ultimately led to religious conversion. (The map of modern-day Islam is defined almost entirely by regions of the world where its traders did business a thousand years ago; most of Islam’s military conquests from the period rejected the religion when the occupying armies left.) Of all the world religions circa 1000 CE, Islam was by far the most cosmopolitan; the most open to new encounters, often facilitated by commerce, with other cultures and religious traditions. They found the insular culture that they interacted with in those port cities to be baffling. “The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs,” the Islamic scholar Al-Biruni noted in the eleventh century. “Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khurasan or Persia, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their minds.”
Despite their differences, the Hindu and Muslim cultures maintained a reasonably harmonious coexistence until the dawn of the second millennium. But that equanimity would not last forever. In 1001, the Afghani sultan Mahmud of Ghazna launched his first attack on the subcontinent, with the dual aim of destroying the infidels and looting their palaces and temples to fund his growing empire. The 1001 raid would be the first of sixteen distinct attacks over the next thirty years. Three years later, Mahmud had crossed the Indus; in 1008 he stormed the citadel of Kangra and walked away with 180 kilos of gold ingots and two tons of silver bullion.
Mahmud’s greed was matched by his remorseless assault on the icons of the Hindu faith. (The word “iconoclast,” now used as a largely approbative term to describe eccentrics, originally referred to destroyers of religious symbols.) Mahmud’s armies had ultimately made it as far south as the Ganges plain by the time of his death in 1030. Within two centuries, Muhammad Ghuri would establish the Delhi sultanate in which, for the first time, the bulk of the Indian subcontinent was under Islamic control, where it would remain for five centuries.
The nature of the Muslim reign over India remains a highly contested question, even today. Some consider it the most devastating genocide in world history. The historian Fernand Braudel describes it in his A History of Civilizations:
The Muslims could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm—burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves.
Other accounts paint a picture of a more tolerant Muslim rule, most notably under the Grand Mughals who came to power with the rise of Babur in 1526. At the apex of the Mughal dynasty—conventionally associated with the rule of Akbar the Great in the second half of the 1500s—India enjoyed a dynamic economy and limited religious discrimination. Akbar was himself a scholar of world literature; he appointed many non-Muslims to civil posts and eliminated a tax that specifically targeted Hindus. He even attempted to form a hybrid religion, known as the Din-i Ilahi, or “Divine Religion,” that would incorporate elements from both Islam and Hinduism, though it never took hold.
The last Muslim leader to rule India without significant contest would come to power in 1658, within a few years of Henry Every’s birth. His full imperial title was Abu Muzaffar Muhiuddin Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir. But to most of the world, he was known by a single name: Aurangzeb.
Imagine a split-screen vision of the late 1650s: an infant is born to an undistinguished family in the West Country of England, while five thousand miles away, the new heir to a dynasty ascends to the Peacock Throne for the first time. It is hard to imagine two lives with less in common, separated as they were by geography, culture, class, religion, and language. But as improbable as it might have seemed at the time, a series of events would eventually draw mighty Aurangzeb and Henry Every into violent conflict with each other.
That unlikely intersection had consequences that extended far beyond the scale of individual lives. A spectator in the late 1650s watching that split-screen view of Every’s birth and Aurangzeb’s ascension would have found it almost impossible to believe that the Islamic era in India was about to collapse, giving way to British imperial forces that would control the subconti
nent for two more centuries. The British occupation of India is such a defining fact of the modern age that it is hard to imagine an alternate timeline. But if the story of Henry Every’s life had played out differently, that occupation might not have happened at all.
4
HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS
Algiers
Circa 1675
While Henry Every would eventually become the most notorious pirate in the world, he may well have begun his Royal Navy career attempting to rid the seas of the terrible scourge of piracy. According to a biography of Every by Adrian Van Broeck, young Every “set sail from Plymouth” aboard a “Fleet of Men of War that was then going to suppress the Nest of Pirates at Algiers.” Following a narrative arc that would become increasingly common in the sea novels that flourished in the nineteenth century, Van Broeck has Every quickly making a name for himself on board. “Young Every shews an uncommon readiness in the practice of maritime affairs,” he writes, “and not only gets into the esteem of the officers of his Majesty’s ship the Revolution, which he served aboard, but of the Commadore Rear Admiral Lawson . . . having exerted an extraordinary Vigor and Sprightliness while Algiers was reduced to reason by the terror of the English Navy.”
Elements of Van Broeck’s account do have a basis in historical fact. A Vice Admiral John Lawson did in fact command a fifty-gun frigate called the HMS Resolution, and spent several years attempting to protect British merchant ships from the Barbary pirates that operated out of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. The problem is that Lawson’s main tour of duty in the Mediterranean took place in the early 1660s, and Lawson himself died in a naval battle with the Dutch off the coast of Suffolk in 1665; the Resolution was sunk in the St. James’ Day Battle with the Dutch the following year. If Henry Every was in fact born in Newton Ferrers in 1659, he would have to have been an usually precocious sailor to have served with John Lawson in Algiers in the early 1660s. (Perhaps his “Vigor and Sprightliness” derived from the fact that he was only three years old at the time.) Of course, teenage boys were a regular presence on Royal Navy ships, and in Van Broeck’s account, Every was born in 1653, which leaves open the slender possibility that he set sail with Lawson on the Resolution as a cabin boy in his eighth or ninth year. But that would have been uncommonly young even by the standards of the Royal Navy, and it seems unlikely that a child of that age would have made any impression whatsoever on an admiral, however “vigorous” he might have been.
A second HMS Resolution—this one a seventy-gun, third-rate ship of the line—launched in 1667 and was also deployed against the Barbary pirates in the late 1660s, though not with Lawson on board. But if we are to believe that Every was born in 1659, and ultimately participated in some kind of nautical battle in which “Algiers was reduced to reason by the terror of the English Navy,” then the most likely scenario is that Every joined the navy in the early 1670s and participated in a series of attacks against the cities of the Barbary Coast during that period.
Whatever the actual chronology might have been, it does seem fitting that Every would have been inspired to join the navy by the promise of inflicting terror on the Barbary pirates. Growing up on the southern coast of England, the legendary corsairs of North Africa would have played a prominent role in the nightmares and folktales of Every’s childhood. The Barbary pirates had been attacking British merchant ships in the Mediterranean for more than a century, but they also posed a far more immediate threat to the coastal communities of England and Ireland. In 1631, a Barbary pirate raid on the small Irish village of Baltimore in County Cork in the dead of night absconded with almost a hundred people, half of them children, all of whom were sold into slavery back in Algiers. Fourteen years later, two hundred forty English citizens living on the Cornish coast were captured and enslaved. (Many were ultimately ransomed by Parliament and returned to England years later.) Rumors held that as many as sixty Barbary men-of-war were actively prowling the English Channel, waiting for the opportunity to capture more product for the slave markets of Algiers and Tripoli. For most of the seventeenth century, an English or Irish family living near the coast confronted the real possibility that they might be hauled off without warning to a North African prison. A Committee for Algiers established by Parliament in 1640 estimated that as many as five thousand English citizens were enslaved in North Africa. Those numbers suggest that the odds of sudden enslavement by Barbary pirates were far higher for the average Devonshire resident than the odds of experiencing a terrorist attack in a modern-day Western city.
From the British perspective, these predations meant that the Barbary pirates were classified according to a venerable legal tradition, one of the earliest terms of international law: Hostis humani generis, Latin for “enemies of all mankind.” Raiding coastal villages to kidnap families and sell them into slavery constituted a transgression that went beyond the usual offenses of criminal behavior. The Barbary pirates had committed crimes against humanity itself, and thus warranted more extreme forms of punishment for their actions. For centuries, the classification of Hostis humani generis was reserved exclusively for pirates—Every and his men would find themselves condemned with that phrase two decades after the British Navy “reduced Algiers to reason”—in part because the pirates committed acts of atrocity that went beyond the usual boundaries of criminal behavior, but also because they committed most of those acts in international waters, where legal jurisdictions were by definition blurry. Declaring that pirates were “enemies of all mankind” gave local authorities on land the legal justification to try them for their crimes, even if those crimes had taken place on the other side of the world. But in the twentieth century, Hostis humani generis would be extended to a broader group of outlaws: war criminals, torturers, and terrorists all found themselves under its ancient umbrella. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department lawyer John Yoo invoked the tradition of Hostis humani generis to justify the extreme treatment of enemy combatants as part of the war on terror. The legal groundwork for the abuses of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib was first laid down to address the unique transgressions of pirates on the open sea.
There was no shortage of hypocrisy in seventeenth-century Britain condemning the Barbary pirates as enemies of all mankind. Some of the most notorious pirates in the world had been English, and had gone about their business with the full endorsement of the Crown. English law during this period attempted to erase this apparent contradiction through a technical loophole, based on the distinction between pirates and privateers. In their actions, privateers seemed almost indistinguishable from pirates: they sacked towns, captured treasure, and seized ships, torturing and killing along the way. But they did so with the blessing of their government, usually in the form of a “letter of marque” that gave them the authority to attack vessels belonging to other nations. “In return for this legal protection,” the historian Angus Konstam writes, “the state that had issued the letter of marque usually received a percentage of the profits. As long as they abided by the rules and attacked only the enemies of the state listed on their letter of marque, privateers could not be hanged as pirates, condemned to a lifetime of servitude in the galleys, or simply killed outright.” Conventionally, the privateers were only allowed to attack ships belonging to nations that were officially enemy states, under a formal declaration of war. But the lines were often blurred, and the privateers, who had developed a taste for the buccaneer’s lifestyle, were ill-inclined to give it up when the official hostilities ended. “Privateers in time of War,” the early pirate historian Charles Johnson observed in his General History of the Pyrates, “are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace.”
Privateering as a formal assignation dates back to the reign of Edward I. British merchant ships that had been attacked by pirates were granted “Commissions of Reprisal”—the forebear of the letter of marque—which gave them the right to capture non-British merchant ships themselves. Technically, the arrangement was designed to be a stric
t tit-for-tat: the privateers were supposed to only seize ships flying the colors of the pirates that had originally stolen from them. But in practice, the privateers were less discriminating, and often hauled in far more treasure than they had originally lost.
Privateering came into its own in the 1500s as England’s relationship with Spain grew increasingly hostile, a period in which “legitimate trade, aggressive mercantilism, and outright piracy commingled and coalesced,” as the historian Douglas Burgess describes it. With Spanish galleons transporting untold riches of silver, gold, and spice from the Americas back to Seville, and the stigma of piracy removed by the letter of marque, privateering became a career path for a more respectable class of men, most famously Francis Drake, the son of a Devonshire minister, who circumnavigated the globe in the late 1570s and led a series of devastating attacks on Central American ports, accumulating enough wealth and prestige through his adventures to be knighted by Elizabeth I and acquire the stately manor house Buckland Abbey in Devon, now preserved by the National Trust. As Burgess writes, “Drake’s colossal success not only made him a hero, it made him a prototype—the standard by which all future pirates would be judged and by which they judged themselves.”
All of this history meant young Henry Every would have had two distinct models of piracy in his mind as he left Plymouth with the Royal Navy: the murderous Barbary pirates, living outside the boundaries of human decency, enemies of all mankind; and the dashing figures of Drake and other successful privateers—esteemed men who had lived lives of great adventure and risk, and who had profited mightily from their labors. To be a pirate meant that you were simultaneously beneath contempt and on a thrilling road to respectability—even to knighthood. Those two polarities were maintained for at least a century without much cognitive dissonance for an obvious reason: the Barbary pirates were (mostly) North Africans, attacking innocent British families, while Drake and his peers were sacking Spanish settlements in the New World. That the former should seem monstrous and beyond the pale and the latter worthy of knighthood was simply a case of rooting for the home team.
Enemy of All Mankind Page 4