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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN num: 9780807050071
ISBN number: 0807050075
Label: Beacon Press
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: September 16, 2001
Publishing house: Beacon Press
Sale Popularity Level: 309239
Studio: Beacon Press
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'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
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 very 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.
'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 very 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
Amazon.com Review:
Globalism is nothing new, argue leftist historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Centuries ago, European trade concerns, such as the Dutch East Indies Company and the Virginia Company, sought to create an overseas empire owned by corporations, not governments. Backed by governments all the same, these companies found themselves opposed only by a congeries of revolutionary sailors, artisans, farmers, and smallholders, who formed a 'many-headed hydra' of resistance.
Arguing that this history of resistance to globalism has been unjustly overlooked, Linebaugh and Rediker delineate key episodes. When, for instance, a group of English sailors and common laborers were shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda en route to America, they created their own communal government, which was so pleasant to them that they refused to be 'rescued' and had to be removed to the colonies by force. Their ideological descendants later banded with runaway slaves and other discontents to form multi-ethnic, multilingual pirate navies that hindered the transatlantic traffic in metals, jewels, and captive humans. Some of the men and women involved in these pirate bands, this 'Atlantic proletariat,' put their skills at the service of the American Revolution, which, in the author's view, 'ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation, and citizenship to discipline, divide, and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement.' The fire of rebellion soon spread all the same, they note, to such places as Haiti, Ireland, France, even England, helped along by these peripatetic and unsung rebels.
Linebaugh and Rediker's book is provocative and often brilliant, opening windows onto little-known episodes in world history. --Gregory McNamee
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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
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I recently had the opportunity to see Marcus Rediker speak about his latest book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age." The room he spoke in was absolutely packed, and not just with students seeking to curry favor with their professors. Little kids turned up, as did local high school students. People who went to college when Eisenhower was president turned up as well. Why all the hoopla to see an academic speaking on a weekday evening? One word: pirates. People of all stripes love pirates. They simply can't get enough of these ruffians even though they have been gone from the scene for a couple of hundred years. Something about these rogues appeals to the American spirit, a spirit that also embraces the gunslinger of the Old West. We love the idea of rugged individuals living outside the norms of society, even if that life often led to a violent death at a young age. Look at all the films dealing with pirates and gunslingers, the most recent of which is "Pirates of the Caribbean" starring Johnny Depp. But the book I think Rediker's reputation will ultimately rest upon is this one, "The Many-Headed Hydra," written with fellow historian Peter Linebaugh.
Pirates ultimately play only a small role in this book. What we have here is an endeavor to rewrite the entire history of the transatlantic region from a bottom up perspective. In other words, this book isn't a history of the monarchs of England, or the American Founding Fathers, or the merchants who owned the trading companies. It is a history of those too often ignored over the ages, those who toiled on the plantation, those who acted as foot soldiers in the armies of conquest, those who sailed the ships that brought slaves to the New World, and those held in bondage. It is a book about the men, women, and children who built the very tools necessary for the development and expansion of capitalism and colonization. It is a book about the nefarious "hydra," that mythic beast slain by Hercules and whose name the elites applied to anyone who dared challenge their authority. Francis Bacon wrote a treatise about this "hydra," arguing that they were subhuman "monsters" that the authorities should eradicate at the earliest opportunity. These wretches became the "hewers of fibre and drawers of water," or peons good only for the basest labors.
The authors argue that several key factors played a part in the creation of this hydra. The most important was expropriation, that disastrous English policy that displaced thousands upon thousands of small farmers so that large landowners could fence in land, which led to such massive social unrest that the authorities had to do something about it. They chose to terrorize, to incarcerate, and execute those opposed to the new order. They also chose to ship many of these people overseas to use them as cheap labor to develop properties in the new world. The authors define subsequent events, everything from slave rebellions in Jamaica to a 1741 insurrection in New York, as class warfare between the poor and the wealthy. Members of the hydra (I should say heads of the hydra), according to the authors, always sought to unify their class interests in order to throw off the yoke of the oppressors. And the oppressors always managed to negate these attempts.
"The Many-Headed Hydra" is an enormous effort of scholarship, covering so many obscure events in British, Caribbean, and American history that the casual reader's mind will certainly founder under the onslaught of information. I'm a graduate student in history and I occasionally found myself looking up some of the events and people cited by the authors. Moreover, there are a couple of extraordinarily dense chapters examining how the hewers of fibre and the drawers of water expropriated religion to their own class ends that will further boggle the mind. Not to worry, however, as the general themes of the book crystallize quite clearly through example after example of the attempted rise of the underclass and the subsequent crackdown by those in power. There are so many examples that follow this template that by the time the reader gets to the end of the book he or she is tempted to yell, "Enough already! I get the idea!" Eventual irritation aside, Rediker's and Linebaugh's book is an impressive reinterpretation of transatlantic history. It is also, unfortunately, rabidly left wing and biased. The following example will show the book's emphasis on underclass agency as well as its tendency to overstate its case.
Rediker and Linebaugh claim that impressment, that scurrilous activity effort by naval officers and ships' captains to forcibly coerce sailors into foreign service, was the key factor in starting the American Revolution. While it is no doubt true that the underclass in the American colonies had different beefs with their English masters than the colonial elites did, this book goes way too far in trying to show ... Read More
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"The Many Headed Hydra" by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker is an exceptionally well-written and enlightening history of early capitalism. The authors offer a bottom-up theory of resistance and describe the conditions by which the modern nation state was founded as a solution to the problem of proletariat self-rule. Short narratives, biographies and illustrations of key events and individuals are framed within a discusion of the historical forces of the era, making the book an interesting, thought provoking and entertaining read.
Linebaugh and Rediker describe the brutal process of primitive accumulation where the poor were forced off the land to create the proletariat class. The newly-dispossessed were disciplined harshly and made to labor for the benefit of the investor class. However, the pervasive "culture of fear" that was "indispensible to the creation of labor-power as a commodity" eventually led to revolt, very first with the English Civil War in the 1640s and later throughout the colonial system.
The authors spotlight individuals who made the case for the rights of all people, including Edward Despard, James Naylor, Tom Paine, Thomas Spence and Robert Wedderburn. These voices articulated the desires of the masses to achieve equality and social justice. As these rights were consistently denied, the seeds of discontent and rebellion were planted. When not organizing resistance against empire, many chose piracy, formed their own renegade communities, or chose to live among the Native Americans.
In this light, the authors present the American Revolution as a cooptation of the democratic movement. Capitalist property and wage relations were legislated in a manner that secured elitist privilege. Race, sex and class effectively served to split the proletariat into factions that could be politically controlled. The nation state thus was born as an instrument to empower the bourgeoisie and channel the energies of the masses towards capitalist accumulation.
The unique value of this book is its convincing argument that the world we know may have turned out very differently. This tantalizing possibility is just one reason why "The Many-Headed Hydra" is an intriguing read. I highly recommend it to all.
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In 1741 at Hughson's, a waterfront tavern in New York City, a motley crew of men and women, members of what Linebaugh and Rediker call the Atlantic proletariat planned a rebellion against the New York ruling class. They included among others radical Irishmen and women, Africans slaves, the wretched refuse created by the enclosure of the commons, the plantation system and the slave trade. The rebellion was uncovered by the authorities, its leaders were tried convicted, lynched or broken on the wheel, or sent off to slave in plantations in the West Indies. Newspaper accounts of the time described vast crowds gathering from all over New York and elsewhere to view a peculiar, emblematic and perhaps even prophetic phenomenon. The lynched bodies of two leaders of the rebellion, Hughson, an Irishman, and John Gwin, an African, were left to rot as a warning. In death, the white's body turned black, and the black's turned white
According to the authors, this resistance in New York was not unusual. It was just one of many, many rebellions and uprisings in the Atlantic colonies by what the authors call the "hydrarchy," appropriating Francis Bacon's scurrilous metaphor of the many-headed hydra which he borrowed from the myth of Hercules and used to characterize dispossessed and extirpated peasantry of the Atlantic, a characterization used thereafter by the ruling class to describe those whom they enslaved to the exigencies of capitalism. As the authors say in their conclusion on pages 327-328: "In the preceding pages, we have examined the Herculean process of globalization and the challenges posed to it by the many headed hydra. We can periodize the almost two and a half centuries covered here by naming the successive and characteristic sites of struggle: the commons, the plantation, the ship and the factory. In the years 1600-1640, when capitalism began in England and spread through trade and colonization around the Atlantic, systems of terror and sailing ships helped to expropriated the commoners of Africa, Ireland, England, Barbados and Virginia and set them to work as hewers of fibre and drawers of water."
The authors go on to say that in the second phase, 1640-1680, "the hydra reared against English capitalism, very first by revolution in the metropolis, then by servile war in the colonies. Antinomians organized themselves to raise of a New Jerusalem against the wicked Babylon in order to put into practice the biblical precept that God is no respecter of persons. Their defeat deepened the subjection of women and opened the way to transoceanic slavery in Ireland, Jamaica, and West Africa. Dispersed to American plantations, the radicals were defeated a second time in Barbados and Virginia, enabling the ruling class to secure the plantation as a foundation of the new economic order."
They describe the third phase in 1680-1760 as the "consolidation and stabilization of Atlantic capitalism through the maritime state, a financial and nautical system designed to acquire and operate Atlantic markets." They note it was "the sailing ship -- the characteristic machine of this period of globalization -- combined features of the factory and the prison." Consider in this regard the famous 'tryworks" chapter in Moby Dick. They go on to say "�In opposition, pirates built an autonomous, democratic, multiracial social order at sea, but this alternative way of life endangered the slave trade and was exterminated." They note that connected with this counterrevolution from above, "a wave of rebellion ripped through the slave societies of the Americas in the 1730s, culminating in a multiethnic insurrectionary plot by workers in New York in 1741."
The final phase of their history tells the story of how the "motley crew" with Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica and a series of uprisings throughout the hemisphere created "breakthroughs in human praxis--the Rights of Mankind, the strike, the higher-law doctrine--that would eventually help to abolish impressment and plantation slavery." He suggests these rebellions also helped to produce the American Revolution, which, they claim, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation and citizenship to discipline, divide and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement."
After reading this eye-opening leftist history, the polyglot streets of New York, indeed of any port city on the Atlantic, suddenly make a lot more sense. Caught up in the brutal, enslaving machine of capitalism starting in the 1600s, the Atlantic and (and eventually) Pacific proletariat fought back against this deadly system of terror, enslavement and extirpation. And it clearly appears, with the assistance of this people's history of the American colonies, that the sons and daugthers of the hydrarchy are caught up now in just the latest model of Blake's dark, satanic mills, trapped and impressed into the vast, ... Read More
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This is a deeply flawed book. It seeks to construct a radical reinterpretation of the early modern Atlantic world, one which privileges class conflict. To this end, it adopts a romantic, almost pre-Raphaelite vision of medieval European and Indian societies, and then recounts the destruction of those societies by the growth of capitalism. The authors' methodology is to comb through selected primary documents and secondary literature, picking out only those bits that fit the book's thesis. For example, they adopt the class elements of Edmund Morgan's analysis of Bacon's Rebellion (the part that has least survived subsequent scholarship) while doing their best to avoid branding the rebels with genocidal racism towards Indians, which Morgan (and every subsequent scholar) has argued drove the rebellion. Of course, presenting reinterpretations is the purpose of new scholarship, but the authors never actually make an argument or present evidence to justify their dismissal of these previous interpretations. The useful is recited, and the inconvenient is simply ignored.
The book is also awash in errors of fact, all of them conveniently aiding their argument. In fact there is often an interesting correlation between badly used evidence and a poorly referenced footnote. To take a few examples: the authors define antinomianism as the belief that God saves through a free gift of grace (perfectly orthodox Calvinism) and later as the doctrine that salvation occurs through faith alone (perfectly orthodox Protestantism). Their discusion of the Putney debates at one point quotes Thomas Rainborough so out of context as to reverse his intent, and the authors make a completely unsupported connection between the debates and opposition to African slavery. Their interpretation of the Antinomian crisis in Boston involves serious manipulations and omissions of evidence (ex. it is never mentioned that Captain Underhill, a commander in the Pequot War, was also one of Anne Hutchinson's followers; there is also no evidence for the authors' suggestion that the Hutchinsonians ever opposed the institution of slavery; and finally most of her followers were in fact merchants, not "proletarians"). While very much in the same school, the book lacks the subtlety and intelligence that E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill managed to give their finer works. In the end, the popularity of this book lies in its very polemical blindness. Like Wiccans reading Margaret Murray and feeling "it just has to be true," Marxists and anti-globalization protesters devour this book as a confirmation of all their own presuppositions. Evidence was never really necessary.
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