Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
2000
Synopsis: This book rocks! I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my own stuff, and I was beginning to feel bad about letting the field reading slide a little. Especially the radical stuff. I half-reluctantly grabbed this from the bottom of the pile on my shelf, thinking I’d give it a day and jump-start this reading.
A day and a half later, I’m thinking I need to break my rule and buy this book. And I think I need to borrow some of these characters, and start my radical history blog with them.
Linebaugh and Rediker (L&R) begin with a passage from Rachel Carson describing ocean currents. The Atlantic is the scene of this story, so they begin with a view from space. Cosmic forces produce circular planetary currents, and waves originating half a planet away break on European shores. “For centuries,” they say, “fishermen on the lonely shores of Ireland have been able to interpret these long Atlantic swells. the power of an ocean wave is directly related to the speed and duration of the wind that sets it in motion, and to the ‘length of its fetch,’ or the distance from its point of origin. The longer the fetch, the greater the wave. Nothing can stop these long waves. They are visible only at the end, when they rise and break; for most of fetch the surface of the ocean is undisturbed.” (1) Yep, that’s a metaphor for the history they’re going to tell, and a damn nice one (better, I think, than the Hydra vs. Hercules image from the title).
The event that sets these long waves in motion for L&R is the rise of capitalism, specifically the expropriation of commons that began with British enclosure. “In the seventeenth century,” they say, “almost a quarter of the land in England was enclosed. Aerial photography and excavations have located more than a thousand deserted villages and hamlets, confirming the colossal dimensions of the expropriation of the peasantry.” (17) Little throw-away facts like this are strewn throughout the book, making me want to veer off to read about archaeology. But L&R power on. The peasants thrown off the land take to the roads, and are called vagrants, criminals, vagabonds. They are chased, jailed, beaten, branded, and sometimes hanged. And many are impressed or transported, or in L&R’s word, enslaved.
Violence and coerced labor are key elements in the rise of capitalism, say L&R. And they don’t just say it once, or restrict themselves to sanitary description. “Under Henry VIII,” they say, “vagabonds were whipped, had their ears cut off, or were hanged (one chronicler of the age put their number at seventy-five thousand).” (18) Well known historical figures like Shakespeare and Francis Bacon react to risings and rebellions in their neighborhoods. Bacon comes under repeated scrutiny, as L&R compare his historical reputation as an enlightenment philosopher to his brutal treatment of prisoners as solicitor general, repression of Irish peasants as enclosing landlord, and his 1622 Advertisement Touching An Holy War. But the terror wasn’t limited to the British Isles, it was also used to control the indentured or enslaved criminals who tried to run away from colonies like Virginia. In 1611, a group who “did Runne Away unto the Indyans...[were] hangedSome burnedSome to be broken on wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death.” (34)
“In 1649 the Parliamentary Committee for the Preservation of Timber was formed to check the depredations of the ‘looser and disordered sort of people’ who continued to insist on their common rights in the forest.” (43) This would make a nice jumping-off place for a rural history of forest people (note to self). Similarly, British water privatization began “with the New River Company, chartered in 1619, which brought water from Hertfordshire to Clerkenwell reservoirs...to private subscribers.” (49) People were resources to be privatized as well: In 1619 Bacon granted London authorities the power to “imprison any child who continued to resist” transportation to Virginia. The names of “165 were recorded. By 1625 only twelve of those were still alive...There is little reason to assume different outcomes for the fourteen to fifteen hundred children said to be on their way to Virginia in 1627,” and presumably many more in years without records. (59)
The experiences of these “hewers of wood and drawers of water” are shocking and graphic. So when rebels, pirates, and revolutionaries grow up in these circumstances, it’s not an intellectual development in some sterile ideological world. It’s the reaction of people who’ve been treated inhumanely, and who’ve seen their families and friends brutalized and dehumanized. Winstanley and the Diggers recognized “that the death penalty was logically related to the enclosure movement [that] ‘hedges the weake out of the Earth, and either starves them, or else forces them through poverty to take from others, and then hangs them for so doing.’” (118) Not a bad argument against execution in the 21st century...
The expression of the “world turned upside down,” that linked all the places around the Atlantic and communicated revolutionary ideas, was the pirate ship. (162) Pirate crews were egalitarian, racially integrated, and democratic, say L&R. While some of their descriptions may be romanticized (as a reviewer suggested), they may also illustrate contemporary popular views of piracy, especially among L&R’s mostly-invisible target population of hewers and drawers. Hyrdarchy, the pirate world-view, is central to their story, as is Britain’s war against it. L&R suggest that pirates became a target of the empire when they turned their attention from harassing Spanish shipping to attacking the slave trade. (168) But even when the pirates were defeated, the “motley crew shaped the social, organizational, and intellectual histories” of the Atlantic world by spreading a “proletarian experience” and a resistance tradition that L&R believe was the catalyst of the American Revolution. (212)
Part of the motley crew’s contribution was expanding the definition of liberty to the rights of man. L&R say elite young rebels like Samuel Adams “faced a dilemma: how could he watch a crowd of Africans, Scotsmen, Dutchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen battle a press-gang and then describe them as being engaged simply in a struggle for the ‘rights of Englishmen’?” (216) Similarly, the experience of resisting Press Gangs, and of British Navy life when they failed, gave poor men of all ethnic backgrounds a sense of solidarity and a reason to oppose slavery. “If the artisans and gentlemen of the American Sons of Liberty saw their rebellion as but ‘one episode in a worldwide struggle between liberty and despotism,’ sailors, who had a much broader experience of both despotism and he world, saw their own struggle as part of a long Atlantic contest between slavery and freedom.” (221)
The Sons of Liberty, in L&R’s story, ultimately betray the revolution and open the door for the counterrevolutionary settlement represented by the Constitution. The Virginia manumission offered by Lord Dunmore and the American response to it seem like interesting possibilities for further American stories. Paine’s increased radicalism and return to America after imprisonment in France also seems relevant in this light. L&R leave the American story at this point, to return to England.
L&R regularly expose elite intellectuals as tools of the ruling class. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan blames the slaves for their enslavement, and in The Holy War (1682) “Bunyan inverts the historical truth, pretending that Africans assaulted European Christendom rather than the reverse.” (99) Burke calls the people a “swinish multitude,” causing Spence to respond with Pig’s Meat; Or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. Paine doesn’t take his vindication of natural rights far enough, and must be corrected by Wollstonecraft and Spence. And Malthus blames the people, projecting a population crisis to distract attention from the expropriation crisis that is actually causing the famine in his contemporary England.
Along the way, a number of interesting facts drop. “William Cobbett reported in 1798 the belief that in Virginia and the Carolinas ‘some of the free negroes have already been admitted into the conspiracy of the United Irishmen.’” (279) And “between 1801 and 1831 alone, 3,511,770 acres of common land were legislated from the agricultural population...by the Parliament of landlords.” (315) Wedderburn charged “Malthus has said, to please the rich, that the superabundant population is doomed to perish by the laws of nature.” James Kelley wrote of Jamaica in 1838 that “sailors and Negroes are ever on the most amicable of terms...[Slaves had] a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor...In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels a man.” (321)
There’s a really nice scene toward the end, where Volney visits Jefferson at Monticello. After dinner, they go out to see the slaves, who are dirty and dressed in rags. Jefferson orders them around, they sullenly obey and passively resist. This is a view we never get of the founding father, and it deflates him quite effectively (even if Volney made it up). Cobbett and Joseph Priestley denounced Volney, L&R say; and Adams probably had him in mind when he legislated against aliens. (344)
Labor history, L&R conclude, spends too much time talking about “the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker.” (332) What’s lost, they suggest, are the people who really tied together the Atlantic world. This is a compelling thought for me, in light of the reading I’m doing and ultimately the writing I want to do about transatlantic radicals. And even without that, it’s just so much more interesting and compelling. If this is what the new “new labor history” looks like, I want to read more of it!
Some people to keep an eye out for:
James Nayler: Yorkshire evangelist, rode through the gates of Bristol on an ass in 1656, to suggest the kingdom was at hand. Got 310 lashes, forehead branded, tongue bored through with a red-hot iron. (95-6)
Thomas Rainborough: argued the Leveller’s position in the Putney Debates, assassinated by royalists in 1648.
Masaniello: fisherman, led Naples Rebellion in 1647. Executed.
Robert Lockyer: soldier, opposed Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in 1649. Executed.
Nathaniel Bacon
Edward and Catherine Despard: plotted to overthrow English monarchy. Edward Executed 1803.
Robert Wedderburn (1762-1836?)
William “Black” Davidson: sailor, shoemaker’s union secretary, cabinetmaker. Implicated in Cato Street Conspiracy. Hanged.
Thomas Hardy (LCS)
Critics: This book got a LOT of attention.
References:
Primary:
Volney’s Ruins, Burke and Paine
C. Osborne Ward, The Ancient Lowly, 1888
Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter, or a History of Bacon in Virginia, 1690
Strange News From Virginia, 1677 (Bacon’s Rebellion)
A General History of the Pyrates
Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, 1800
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the rights of Women, 1792
Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, 1796
Spence, The Rights of Infants, 1796
---------. The Giant Killer, 1814
Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, 1789
