The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic / Edition 2

by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker

Overview

Winner of the International Labor History Award

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.

When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe.

Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a 'hydra' and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807033173
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	454,426
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Peter Linebaugh, professor of history at the University of Toledo, is a contributing editor of Albion's Fatal Tree and author of The London Hanged.

Marcus Rediker, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, winner of the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize and the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Social History Award.

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From the Introduction
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Excerpted from "The Many-Headed Hydra"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Peter Linebaugh.
Excerpted by permission of Beacon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction     1
 
1     The Wreck of the Sea-Venture     8
 
2     Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water     36
 
3     “A Blackymore Maide Named Francis”     71
 
4     The Divarication of the Putney Debates     104
 
5     Hydrarchy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State     143
 
6     “The Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth”     174
 
7     A Motley Crew in the American Revolution     211
 
8     The Conspiracy of Edward and Catherine Despard     248
 
9     Robert Wedderburn and Atlantic Jubilee     287
 
Conclusion Tyger! Tyger!     327
 
A Map of the Atlantic 1699     354
 
Notes     355
 
Acknowledgments     413
 
Index     417

Editorial Reviews

For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged. —David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker

"A landmark in the development of an Atlantic perspective on early American history. Ranging from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean and North America, it makes us think in new ways about the role of working people in the making of the modern world."—Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom

"What would the world look like had the levelers, the diggers, the ranters, the slaves, the castaways, the Maroons, the Gypsies, the Indians, the Amazons, the Anabaptists, the pirates . . . won? Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker show us what could have been by exhuming the revolutionary dreams and rebellious actions of the first modern proletariat, whose stories~until now~were lost at sea. They have recovered a sunken treasure chest of history and historical possibility and spun these lost gems into a swashbuckling narrative full of labor, love, imagination, and startling beauty." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!

"The Many-Headed Hydra is about connections others have denied, ignored, or underemployed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together to create a new economy and a new class of working people. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker tell their story with deep sympathy and profound insight. . . . A work of restoration and celebration of a world too long hidden from view."—Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

"More than just a vivid illustration of the gains involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here, in incendiary form, are essential elements for a people's history of our dynamic, transcultural present."—Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic

"This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture, with eloquence and literary flair, the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic."—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

From the Publisher

Deriding the "historic invisibility" of their subjects--"the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy"--Linebaugh (The London Hanged), professor of history at the University of Toledo, and Rediker (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea), associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, reveal that throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, mobile workers of all sorts--maids, slaves, felons, pirates and indentured farm hands--formulated ideas about freedom and justice that would eventually find expression in the American Revolution. The moneymen thought of themselves as noble heirs to Hercules, "symbol of power and order," and referred to the people they mobilized across continents as "hydra," after Hercules's many-headed foe. During these early days of intercontinental commerce, there were many small rebellions, and Linebaugh and Rediker's book is especially valuable for its rich descriptions of the lesser-known revolts, including one by slaves in New Jersey who "conspired to kill their masters," burn their property and make off with their horses in 1734, and another by Native American whalers who tried to torch Nantucket in 1738. The authors also describe the March 1736 "Red String Conspiracy": 40 to 50 Irish felons, who planned to burn Savannah, kill all the white men and escape with a band of Indians (the conspirators wore red string around the right wrist to identify themselves). Their plot was foiled but caused great unrest in Savannah. This book provides a unique window onto early modern capitalist history. The authors are to be commended not only for recovering the voices of obscure folk, but also for connecting them to the overarching themes of the age of revolution. 50 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A revealing work of leftist revisionist history whose cast includes sailors, seamstresses, farmers, and a Founding Father or two. Linebaugh (History/Univ. of Toledo) and Rediker's (History/Univ. of Pittsburgh) sweeping account of the stateless poor of the 16th- and 17th-century Atlantic opens with a telling anecdote. In 1609, an English vessel was shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda, where the survivors found not a hellish land of cannibals and devils (as the charts had promised) but an"Edenic land of perpetual spring and abundant food"—and where, for the first time ever, these children of post-Restoration England could be free. When, some months later, rescuers arrived, they had to chase these new noble savages out of the woods and haul them off to the Virginia colony by force. Such, the authors suggest, was often the case in the New World: the earliest crossings of the Atlantic Ocean were undertaken by men and women who had nothing to lose, the multiethnic dispossessed who struggled to make new lives at a remove from the emerging capitalist order of Europe (whose spokesmen in turn portrayed the resistant mob as a"hydra-headed monster" against which only a crowned Hercules could prevail). Linebaugh and Rediker document a series of little-known rebellions large and small—most fomented by sailors, who were accustomed to struggling with masters for food, pay, and work and who"brought to the ports a militant attitude toward arbitrary and excessive authority." Though sometimes fashionably dense in the postmodern manner, Linebaugh and Rediker's"hidden history" is in the main both accessible and persuasive, and not without itsshareof surprises—including a startling new view of the African-American revolutionary martyr Crispus Attucks, whose biography extends well beyond mere victim of the Boston Massacre. An intriguing and welcome addition to the historical literature of the period.

Kirkus Reviews