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

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 wood and drawers of water." The authors go on to say that in the second phase, 1640-1680, "the hydra reared against English capitalism, 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 desig

This book is a treasure of insights and connections which counterpoints the usual and self serving version of history told through the citation of famous people, famous places, and famous things. I was looking for for connections between the Leveller's Agreement of the People and the specifics of the US Constitution, between which stands approximatley 150 years. This book assisted my understanding of the linkages and dismissed many popularly presumed disconnections. The Many Headed Hydra in effect tells the stories of the common people, slaves, sailors, and exiled agitators for democracy and how the resistance to corporate and despotic governance was carried on through to the non violent seizure of the means of governance in rural Massachusetts by the farmers in 1774. It is really no wonder why this book won the the International Labor History Award. This book does not favor preconceived assumptions of the nature and history of democracy, nor of the posturing imposed as the official version of the history of the America or the United States. This stories within this book include resistance to the privatization of common lands in England, as well as to the usurptation of lands within the American continents, slavery in its several forms including impressment and chattel, the beginning of global imperialism as we know it today, and the establishment of maroon societies. Any education about current global events and issues is incomplete without the knowledge of the historical perspective and background reflected in The Many-Headed Hydra. Each chapter could easily be expanded into a separate book. It is an excellent piece of collaboration and scholarship

Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged, and Marcus Rediker, author of Between the devil and the deep blue sea, have joined forces to produce this splendid history of the hydra of working class resistance and organisation in the 17th and 18th centuries. In wonderfully vigorous prose, they celebrate the defiant spirit of the untameable Promethean multitudes who ended slavery, and created the ideas of cooperative political economy and culture, of those who ‘dare seize the fire’, in William Blake’s words.They trace the bloody birth of capitalism in 17th century England, and how capitalism spread through trade and colonisation around the Atlantic, expropriating the commoners of England, Ireland, Africa, Barbados and Virginia and imposing slavery. The years 1680 to 1760 saw the rise of the British maritime state: by the 1690s, the Royal Navy was Britain’s largest employer. The authors ...cite James Rawley’s comment, "In the decade of the 1730s England had become the supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world", though surely England’s ruling class, not the nation, owned the slave ships and ran the plantations.They tell the stories of the waves of slave revolts and urban insurrections in 1730s and 1740s throughout British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish possessions, notably the New York Conspiracy of 1741 and Jamaica’s Maroon War of the 1730s. In the 1760s and 1770s another wave of slaves’ rebellions provided the arsenal of ideas that inspired the American, French and Haitian Revolutions. Linebaugh and Rediker vividly depict the struggle against slavery and empire, against the pressgangs and brutality of the owners and employers. They show how sailors organised themselves, ‘a motley crew’, composed of people from all nations. When London’s sailors in 1768 struck (lowered) their sails, they added another weapon, and word, to the workers’ armoury. Using the rebels’ own words and ideas, they tell the stories of those who fought for progress against the owners of the commons, ship, plantation and factory. They portray the revolutionary spirit of those who founded our trade unions, against the law.

When the World Trade Organization meets, we are used to seeing protests from people who think that the global economy is somehow wrong, that current capitalism is not the best way to protect workers or the environment, and that the world should somehow be put on the right course. Such opposition seems like a recent phenomenon, but according to _The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic_ (Beacon Press) by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, there has been protest against capitalism ever since capitalism began. Their book is a valuable history to show that the ideas of property and land use that we take for granted were not inevitable.The book's title comes from the legend of Hercules attempting to slay the hydra; whenever he cut one of the heads off the fearsome beast, two would grow in its place. The use of the story from the seventeenth century on was not just a boast of knowledge of the classics or a mere rhetorical ornament. The hydra, over and over again, stood for the mob, dispossessed commoners, religious radicals, pirates, sailors, slaves and more. Essentially, in religious and political harangues, the many heads of the hydra stood for all the unseemly factions that were standing in the way of those with possessions to get more possessions. As the book shows, mentioning decapitation of the hydra was in many cases not a figure of speech, but was a call to actual capital punishment, or simple murder. The main subjects of the book (and the authors write many of them up as heroes) are the often obscure sailors, slaves, and women who were caught up in the eighteenth century's enthusiasm for revolution and liberty. There were several engines that drove the protest. The claiming of the common land as personal property of those with wealth meant that (as was written in 1655) "the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people... and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons." The indentures of workers sent to the colonies were often little better than slavery. Sailors were impressed into the Navy against their wills. By these means the elite strove to maintain political and economic power, and they were horrified whenever the hydra showed any protest.The authors are professors of history who have both written about the eighteenth century, and here they have dug into books, diaries, and pamphlets of the period to look at the view of ordinary people. It is a dense book, a serious study lightened by biographical sketches and moving portrayals of men and women persecuted for damning tyranny and advocating liberty. There are accounts of rebellions large and small, of slave uprisings all over the New World, of sailors who mutinied against oppressive captains, and of pirates who, surprisingly, ran humane and democratic ships in opposition to the elite. What if all the dispossessed had won and something more egalitarian than cap

The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker is a tour of the revolutionary underworld during a period of dramatic change--the 17th and 18th centuries in the Atlantic World. The authors show how the revolutionary political and religious upheavals of the mid-17th century in England spawned a floating, multiracial "motley crew" which provided the street mobs whose demonstrations gave impetus to the breakaway of the American colony. They also deal with the counter-revolutionary reaction to the many-headed hydra as ruling elites took extreme measures to suppress the mob. The book is meticulously researched and is written in a fine, engaging prose that make it hard to put down.