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No one present at the Battle of Cape Lopez in 1722 could have known that they were on the edge of history. There was no way to predict just how monumental an impact this obscure but fierce naval battle off the coast of West Africa would have on British colonies and the future of slavery in America. Gentlemen of Fortune is a groundbreaking exploration of the figures and events surrounding this lesser-known naval battle, the outcome of which signaled a major turning point in the Atlantic slave trade and triggered a deep and lasting legacy.

Gentlemen of Fortune focuses on three fascinating figures whose fates would violently converge: Jan Conny, a charismatic leader of the Akan people who made lucrative deals with pirates and smugglers while making enemies out of the British and Dutch; the infamous pirate Black Bart, who worked his way from an anonymous navigator to a pirate king and one of the British Empire’s most notorious enemies in the region; and British naval captain Chaloner Ogle, tasked by the Crown with hunting down and killing Black Bart at all costs. At the Battle of Cape Lopez, these three men and the massive historical forces at their backs would finally find each other―and the world would be transformed forever.

By defeating Black Bart at the Battle of Cape Lopez, the British Empire was able to achieve supremacy in the West African slave trade. Chattel slavery―in which an enslaved person is considered fully the private property of an owner―was born, and it was soon brought to America.

In this landmark narrative history, historian Angela Sutton outlines the complex network of trade routes spanning the Atlantic Ocean trafficked by agents of empire, private merchants, and brutal pirates alike. Drawing from a wide range of primary historical sources, most of which―because they are written in Dutch and German―have not been engaged with by popular audiences, Sutton offers a new perspective on how a single battle played a pivotal role in reshaping the slave trade in ways that affect America to this day.

Between its engaging narrative style filled with swashbuckling naval battles and tales of adventure at sea, its wide array of rigorous and detailed research, and its implications towards modern America, Gentlemen of Fortune is an essential addition to every history reader’s shelves.

Angela Sutton is an Assistant Research Professor at Vanderbilt University, where she has taught a variety of history courses including Seapower in History, The Golden Age of Piracy, and Comparative Slavery. She is Director of the Fort Negley Descendants Project, an oral history archive of the descendants of the enslaved who built and defended a Civil War fortress in Nashville on the UNESCO Slave Route.

A native German speaker who has studied 17th-century Dutch language and paleography with the Dutch governing body of language at Columbia University, Sutton is able to read and translate new primary sources almost entirely inaccessible to American historians. In 2010, she received a Fulbright research grant to the Netherlands for research in the Dutch National Archives and Royal Library in The Hague, the basis of which formed her dissertation and this book.

Sutton has published articles with academic journals including The Historical Journal, the Afro-Hispanic Review, Archipelagos, and Slavery & Abolition. She currently serves as subject expert & consultant for various history-related multimedia projects, most recently a documentary podcast for BBC Radio 4 on ghosts of slavery (A Natural History of Ghosts: The Whitewashed Ghost), a historical documentary produced by Joseph Hill on the United States Colored Troops, and an upcoming podcast segment on Southern history & memory with the NEH-funded Oxford American’s Points South.