Status
Call number
Publication
DDC/MDS
| 909 |
Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
Linebaugh and Rediker look at the social history of England, the eastern seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, and the ocean that connected them, from early colonization to the turn of the 19th century. Told from the perspective of
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book wasn't strictly limited to life on the high seas; rather, it was a history of the economies on both sides of the Atlantic and the everyday (and not so everyday) non-elite people who built them, laying the ground work for the modern capitalist society.
As a history major and buff, a lot of the "big ideas" put forth weren't particularly new to me, as academic historians' interest in social history has intensified enormously in the last generation or so. The individual stories, however, were fascinating. Linebaugh and Rediker present a very different world from the one you may have been taught in history class: whereas the American founding fathers are depicted as radical revolutionaries in popular culture, they were actually quite conservative in comparison to many of the populist, radical movements that were the undercurrent of the Age of Revolution.
Recommended, especially for those with a budding interest in social history and/or this particular place and time in history.