The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. (Book Reviews).

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

Verso, London and New York, 2000, pp. 433

ISBN 1-85984-798-6 (hbk) [pounds sterling]19:00

In 1991 Penguin published a book called The London Hanged. Documenting the changing nature of public executions in eighteenth century London, a central theme of the book was to explain why more and more people were being hanged during this period for crimes against private property: many of these 'crimes' had earlier been deemed customary rights. Drawing upon a wealth of primary documentary evidence the book rediscovered the lost voices of those about to be 'launched into eternity' in London and, at the same time, rediscovered a particular manifestation of proletarian struggle against early capitalist forms of exploitation. The author of this tremendous historical exploration was an ex-student of E. P. Thompson's named Peter Linebaugh. With Marcus Rediker, an established historian in his own right with an equally impressive number of books to his credit, Linebaugh has extended this tradition of Marxist history writing to focus upon the (extra)ordinary struggles of those who found themselves labouring for the first global economy across the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Linebaugh and Rediker begin their marvellous book by first explaining the meaning of the term 'many-headed hydra'. Derived originally from one of numerous Ancient Greek myths, the many-headed hydra was symbolic of disorder and resistance to the centralising force of Hercules. For the Greeks and Romans Hercules' quest to rid the world of the hydra was symptomatic of their respective ambitions of 'the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and of the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, and establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology' (p. 2). To slay the hydra meant for the ruling classes to slay all of that which stood in the way of their imperial ambitions. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that the hydra myth was to become a potent ideology for generations of elite thinkers and practitioners. Nowhere is this clearer than with bourgeois ideologues during the period covered by the book. Linebaugh and Rediker note how a whole spectrum of social thinker s appropriated the hydra myth and gave it a new form to justify 'the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executions, of plantations, ships, and factories' (p. 6). In short, insist Linebaugh and Rediker, the hydra myth gave these thinkers 'a hypothesis' about the vast social changes wrought by the multiple connections of global commodity capitalism.

Linebaugh and Rediker begin their story proper by focusing upon the 1609 voyage of the Sea-Venture, a ninety-eight-foot, three hundred ton vessel sailing from Plymouth to England's first new world colony in Virginia. With the original intention of lending assistance to the new plantation owned by the Virginia Company of London, the Sea-Venture never reached her destination and instead ended up wrecked in Bermuda due to a hurricane. While on Bermuda a division emerged between the sailors who wanted to enjoy a communal life on the island and those who wanted to continue the commercial journey to Virginia. Several rebellions were mounted by sailors against the dominance of the Virginia Company and by recounting these rebellions Linebaugh and Rediker set up a narrative for the rest of the book: 'a story about uprooting and movement of peoples, the making and deployment of "hands". It is a story about exploitation and resistance to exploitation...It is a story about cooperation among different kinds of people for contrasting purposes of profit and survival' (p. 14).

From this starting point Linebaugh and Rediker take us, the reader, through a list of lost histories. We learn, for instance, that the 'hewers and the drawers of water' (those whose labour cleared woodland and drained fens for enclosures) also built vast ports for global trade. In addition this labouring class supported land and sea communities through their efforts at chopping and gathering materials and pumping water. In an era when wood and water were the basics for survival on long sea journeys such labour was integral for a nascent global capitalist economy. We learn how the ideas of the Ranters, Levellers and the Diggers filtered into the common-sense of this labouring class. And far from being a white and male preoccupation, Linebaugh and Rediker demonstrate through the example of a black seventeenth-century female servant named Francis that revolutionary ideas seized those from different genders and from different races. By focusing upon Francis, Linebaugh and Rediker show how notions of freedom were mixed with a religious discourse intermingled with a discourse heralding the destruction of the global condition of commodity capitalism (Babylon) and the creation a new order by global (slave) labour (a New Jerusalem). We learn how the maritime state was an integral moment in the development of the first wave of global capitalism and how its efforts were hampered through the democratic practices of pirate ships. We learn about the role of militant crews in keeping alive the spirit of a radical liberty during the American Revolution. We learn about those dispossessed Irish in England who were executed for their 'conspiracies' for justice. And, finally, we learn about uprisings by slaves against their brutal existence.

In short, Linebaugh and Rediker have given us a breathtaking account of the historical foundations of globalisation and, as such, go beyond many of the superficial narratives by contemporary commentators of capital's worldwide dominance. By working within the best traditions of Marxist history writing, the authors have presented a truly phenomenal expose of capitalism whilst demonstrating the humanity that capital must face in its global plunder of value. One not to be missed.