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

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.

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.

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