Book Description
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.
There were no survivors of Hartman’s lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger—torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places—a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built
to repel slave raiders—and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.
Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.
Customer Reviews:
Extraordinarily Insightful and Eloquent.......2007-07-22
A deeply moving combination of history, personal memoir and deep reflection,particularly on the heroic and aspirational legacy of slavery as seen by this wonderful writer.
Spectacular.......2007-03-26
Saidiya Hartman takes us on a journey that is intense, tough and thoroughly rewarding. Impressively, she learned as much about herself as she did about the past she sought, even more.
The beauty of going with her on this journey is that the reader has the same magnificent opportunity, hypnotically led by the author, to ponder and to gain personal insight perhaps too long submerged.
Brilliant!.......2007-01-18
Lose Your Mother is a story that weaves geneology with African American history. It's intimate and powerful, touching and complex. Universally connecting, it is a story of alienation and hope.
Roots 2.0.......2007-01-17
What "Roots" was to the Boomer Generation, "Lose Your Mother" could and should be to the Generation Next. Saidiay Hartman's writing styles fits perfectly for a generation that longs for and loves narrative, story, and first-hand journal accounts.
However, no one should thus assume that Hartman's writing lacks research credibility for she brilliantly weaves both rousing narrative and copious research to portray a powerful picture of one of history's ugliest stories: Middle Passage. She provides a fresh account of ancient wounds.
Hartman's book can and should make a renewed contribution to the healing of past hurts which still linger deep. Her passionate style and scholarly depth can help a nation move beyond suffering to healing hope.
Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.
Amazon.com
The Slave Trade is a massive (900-page) book that attempts to document the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, a sordid business that somehow prospered for more than four centuries. As the sheer heft of the book might indicate, the story is complicated. Much of the extensive research conducted by Hugh Thomas relates to rivalries both in Europe and Africa. Those who wonder how slavery could have existed in the United States may find revelatory the moral ambiguity of how the business of transporting slaves was conducted.
Book Description
After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.
Customer Reviews:
Another book on the Slave Trade.......2004-03-03
The Slave Trade is a massive work that attempts to explain the Atlantic Slave Trade which dominated the European and American waters for over four centuries. It covers the beginning when the Portuguese first set foot on Africa in the 1400's to the end of the American Civil War. The book is split into six different "books" which range from the herding of slaves into the ships to European and African attempts to abolish this trade. The author, whether purposely or by mistake, portrays the Slave Trade through the eyes of the slave traders themselves. The period of great interest for Thomas is the nineteenth century when the slave trade began to disappear.
When Great Britain abolished the trade in the early 1800's, it began, with the help of West African naval patrols, to suppress the trade still prosperous in Brazil and Cuba. Thomas shows how ineffectual these efforts were for so many years. He is one of the first to correct U.S. historians who assume the slave trade ended during that time. Many North American ships were still involved during that "illegal era," mostly coming from ports in New York, Baltimore, and especially other ports in New England.
Of course, with any 900 page description it is difficult to keep the reader interested simply because there is so much information out there. Thomas admits that writing on the slave trade produces "no new cultivation," yet he feels it is necessary so that it can perhaps "offer something for almost everyone."(11) Although filled with errors, it can be an excellent read for those interested in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
A MUST READ!.......2003-07-27
THE SLAVE TRADE: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 is, perhaps, the single most-important work dealing with the slave trade. This masterful work builds on and partially overlaps John Thornton's AFRICA AND AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1400-1800 and Edward William Bovill's THE GOLDEN TRADE OF THE MOORS. It also provides an essential bridge between those works and Ira Berlin's MANY THOUSANDS GONE: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America & MAROON SOCIETIES: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (edited by Richard Price).
Starting with the first major shipload of African (white, café au lait and black) slaves taken in a razzia by Portuguese in 1444, Thomas briefly looks backward at the history of slavery among Christians, non-African Muslims and Africans - pagan, Christian and Muslim. He recounts the origins of the Atlantic slave trade - including the long-existing North African-Spanish conflict with mutual slave raids and the beginning of the coastal trade in West Africa associated with Prince Henry's desire for exploration, conquest, profit and religious zeal and the equal desire for conquest and / or profit of almost all African rulers and aristocrats, as well as of numerous merchants (especially Muslim and Mandingo), already familiar with the Trans-Saharan trade. Thomas recounts the early settlements in the Azores and Madeira and Cape Verde Islands, as well as the lengthy effort to conquer the Canary Islanders, including the guanches of Tenerife, and the explorations of Cadamosto. The trade began to be institutionalized by Agreements of mutual benefit between the west coast Africans and European traders (with increasing numbers of slaves being taken from the interior by coastal states)while the plantation system began to develop in Madeira and elsewhere. The fortress at El Mina (Sao Jorge da Mina) was established as well as Arguin and Luanda (which became one of the few exceptions to the principle of non-settlement - of Europeans in Africa - due to fears of antagonizing local rulers, losing trading rights and suffering debilitating and even deadly illnesses). Luso-Africans (persons claiming both Portuguese and African antecedents) increasingly took over the coastal trade in El Mina and Luanda. Despite the papal grant of Portuguese (extended to Spain when the two were temporarily united) monopoly over the trade, the English began entering the slave trade in 1562 under Captain John Hawkins and the Dutch began to be involved in the 1590s.
Thomas then describes the development of "corporations" given monopolies on trading slaves by the various European monarchs and the economic benefits accruing to various European towns, as well as the growing wealth, culture and influence of various West African towns involved the trade. In the 1600s, African slave began to trickle into North America followed by the eventual establishment of the slave-plantation system. Turning to the crossing, Thomas describes, in vivid detail, the horrible conditions slaves encountered aboard ship as well as the high rate of deaths for both (often shanghaied) sailors and human cargo and the inhumane treatment provided to both by the officers as well as the harshness suffered by the latter under the African captors. Included in this section (Book 4) is an account of the various non-human cargo brought to and from Africa.
Turning to the Abolition (of the Slave Trade, if not slavery, itself) movement, the author touches on the views, organizations and actions of political men like Pitt, Wilberforce, Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette as well as the anti-slavery philosophy of men like Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith and Burke (in opposition to the interests of men like Voltaire and Locke). In 1807, the reluctant slave owners, Madison and Jefferson, in America, enacted legislation banning Americans from involvement in the international trade of slaves while non-slaveholders William Pitt and William Wilberforce did the same in the British Empire. Great Britain began to pressure other nations to end the slave trade and many African states began to use more of their slave captives to produce goods for international trade in lieu of slave. Portugal, at the same time, began to trade in even greater numbers of slaves. African merchants also actively opposed the attempts by Britain's AFRICAN INSTITUTION to increase the industriousness and productivity of the general African populace due to the potential danger to their trading interests. Britain paid various African leaders to end the trade (although many captives were executed since the rulers could not sell them due to the abolitionist sentiments among Europeans and Americans). Still, slavery itself was not actually abolished in the British West Indies until 1838. In the mid-1850s Brazil and Britain neared war and Britain forced Brazil to adopt anti-slave trade measures in earnest. The book concludes with the end of Cuban involvement in the trade as Britain began to forcibly occupy some African states (setting the stage for the eventual "colonization" of the continent) in order to finally squash the trade - although the epilogue informs us that as late as 1980, 90,000 blacks are still reported as slaves to Arab masters.
It would not, of course, be fair to leave off without pointing some negligible errors in the book: First, the Sources and Notes section seems to have provided bold headings for some of the latter sections (books) but not the former. However, this does no discernable harm toward the body of the work and a few seconds study will clear up the confusion. In addition, while apparently relying on the best statistics available for the total number of slaves transported via the Atlantic / Trans-Atlantic journeys, the work fails to directly rebut some of the much larger numbers proposed by some historians. The author (in citing one minor source) also fails to respond to the criticisms of Sir Richard Burton and those almost identical ones of Orlando Patterson (who fails, however, to indicate his reliance on that noted bigot) on Mungo Park's reliability. However, such a response is readily available in Kate Ferguson Marsters' Introduction to Park's TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA. Thomas also fails to explain why he differs with Bovill on the exact relationship of the Sanhaja and the Tuareg. All-in-all; however, these are minor points and hardly detract from the incredible depth, breadth, organization and vividness of this masterful work!
A History of the Middle Passage.......2002-10-28
The most important thing to note about the title of this brilliant book is that it is about the slave TRADE, not slavery per se. For descendants of slaves, this distinction may be pretty meaningless, but to the eighteenth century abolitionists it was critical. As Thomas explains, opponents of slavery such as Lord Wilberforce premised their campaign on the theory that the trade in slaves - with its horrendous "middle passage" in which African men, women and children were piled into rotting hulks for weeks on end - was far more deserving of abolition of than the practice of slavery itself. As Thomas points out, the logic of this position now seems extremely dubious, for even after the British and other European navies had suppressed the cross-Atlantic trade, many countries retained their slave plantations, most notably the Southern United States, Brazil and Cuba.
When one tallies up those who traded in slaves, one finds a scandalously large and non-exclusive club - virtually all the nations of Europe, and all the colonial and "liberated" powers of North America, starting with Henry the Navigator of Portugal and ending with the newly formed states of c. 19th Latin America. In 900 pages, Thomas chronicles a trade that covered four continents and four centuries. This is THE work on the slave trade.
Let history begin.......2002-09-19
The record of civilization is haunted by the dread percentage: the largest percentage of its overall duration saw the domination of slavery. Its seemingly endless persistence and relatively sudden abolition reminds us that the 'way things are' is not an argument for the 'way things should be', and that injustice persists in part because our thinking is flawed Thomas' work is a very well-researched account of modern slavery from the fifteen century until its final overthrow in the nineteenth. Although much of Northern Europe was close to seeing salvery dying out in the medieval period its endemic existence as a constant and sudden last phase in the rise of capitalism can be traced backwards via the Portuguese voyages of discovery, as this initiated the last centuries of the disastrous and maleficent Atlantic trade to the Americas. This work is quite comprehensive as to the facts, without commentary. The suddenness of the abolition period is sometimes ascribe to the emergence of the capitalist system, yet there seems to be something missing in that account. Did Rousseau denunciation spring from questions of economic efficiency. The history of slavery seems always an account of men mesmerized by their worlds, finding its evils the basis of phantom normality, men without a history as automatons in their blindness. We inherit the labors of those who woke up to history to let it at last begin. Very useful account at nine hundred pages.
highly informative but not well organized.......2002-07-20
I learned a great deal about the Atlantic slave trade from this book. Among other things,I hadn't realized how extensive the English involvement in the trade was or that there were slaves in Europe itself, even in the UK in the 18th century. The book is long in number of pages but short on summary and analysis. It has mind-numbing chapters of detail about individual slavers, but rarely a coherent description of where things stood at a given point in time. Also it would be helpful to be more familiar than I was with the general history of the West Indies, particularly the British West Indies, and with Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas because the book seems to assume that readers don't need much background on these topics. I thought it picked up speed in later chapters when it began talking about the struggles in Europe, particularly the UK, to end the slave trade - here it seemed like the author was on more familiar ground dealing with British politics, conflicts between European countries and so forth. The organization of the book is hard to follow and the chapter titles are not very helpful, so going back and trying to find information is quite difficult. The information in the book is fascinating, however, so it is still well worth reading.
Book Description
Based on journals and letters of slave traders, merchant seamen, and slaves, themselves, this is a passionate account of the Atlantic slave trade, from its origins in the fifteenth century to it's gradual dissolution in the early 1800s.
Book Description
The grim history of the slave trade from Africa is one that has had an impact on generations of people all over the world. While much of the initial voyage and inhumane treatment of slavery has been historically analyzed, there has been little written on the several forts and castles along the coast of Ghana that were used as slave holding facilities. This book focuses primarily on Cape Coast Castle, the African headquarters of the British slave trade from 1664 to 1807, through which countless men, women, and children were sold as slaves and carried away on slave ships, often to North America. It tells the story of the people who lived, worked, or were imprisoned within its walls, as well as the construction and upkeep of the building, the arrivals and departures of ships, the negotiations with local African leaders, and the deadly diseases inside.
Customer Reviews:
The Business of Slavery .......2007-08-19
Written with the Gold Coast of Africa as its center, this remarkable book is an amazing piece of work. The author uses records recovered from Britain's slave forts to recreate the business life of the trade. We learn how and why people were bartered for manufactured goods and the process of assembly and shipping of human cargo. The recovered douments also provide the personal side never meant to be viewed by others. I found this book to be excellent and recommend it thoroughly.
The Door of No Return is a welcome addition to public and college library history shelves........2007-06-10
Written by William St Claire (former Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University), The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade is an in-depth history of the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, Africa, and its role it served as headquarters for the horrific British slave trade, until the slave trade's abolishment in 1807. Drawing heavily from years of personal research into the Castle's vast archive of public records and ledges - from letters and correspondence to scribbled notes and even the recipes of trafficked slaves - The Door of No Return offers a unique, in-depth scrutiny of this dark place and phase of human history. Written in plain terms and illustrated with a handful of black-and-white photographs, The Door of No Return is a welcome addition to public and college library history shelves.
Amazon.com
Globalism is nothing new, argue leftist historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Centuries ago, European trade concerns, such as the Dutch East Indies Company and the Virginia Company, sought to create an overseas empire owned by corporations, not governments. Backed by governments all the same, these companies found themselves opposed only by a congeries of revolutionary sailors, artisans, farmers, and smallholders, who formed a "many-headed hydra" of resistance.
Arguing that this history of resistance to globalism has been unjustly overlooked, Linebaugh and Rediker delineate key episodes. When, for instance, a group of English sailors and common laborers were shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda en route to America, they created their own communal government, which was so pleasant to them that they refused to be "rescued" and had to be removed to the colonies by force. Their ideological descendants later banded with runaway slaves and other discontents to form multi-ethnic, multilingual pirate navies that hindered the transatlantic traffic in metals, jewels, and captive humans. Some of the men and women involved in these pirate bands, this "Atlantic proletariat," put their skills at the service of the American Revolution, which, in the author's view, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation, and citizenship to discipline, divide, and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement." The fire of rebellion soon spread all the same, they note, to such places as Haiti, Ireland, France, even England, helped along by these peripatetic and unsung rebels.
Linebaugh and Rediker's book is provocative and often brilliant, opening windows onto little-known episodes in world history. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
"For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged."âDavid Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker
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.
"A landmark in the development of an Atlantic perspective on early American history. Ranging from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean and North America, it makes us think in new ways about the role of working people in the making of the modern world."âEric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom
"What would the world look like had the levelers, the diggers, the ranters, the slaves, the castaways, the Maroons, the Gypsies, the Indians, the Amazons, the Anabaptists, the pirates . . . won? Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker show us what could have been by exhuming the revolutionary dreams and rebellious actions of the first modern proletariat, whose stories~until now~were lost at sea. They have recovered a sunken treasure chest of history and historical possibility and spun these lost gems into a swashbuckling narrative full of labor, love, imagination, and startling beauty."âRobin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!
"The Many-Headed Hydra is about connections others have denied, ignored, or underemployed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together to create a new economy and a new class of working people. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker tell their story with deep sympathy and profound insight. . . . A work of restoration and celebration of a world too long hidden from view."âIra Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
"More than just a vivid illustration of the gains involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here, in incendiary form, are essential elements for a people's history of our dynamic, transcultural present."âPaul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic
"This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture, with eloquence and literary flair, the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic."âHoward Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
Customer Reviews:
Table of Contents.......2006-10-22
Table of Contents
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
From the bottom up.......2004-11-03
I recently had the opportunity to see Marcus Rediker speak about his latest book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age." The room he spoke in was absolutely packed, and not just with students seeking to curry favor with their professors. Little kids turned up, as did local high school students. People who went to college when Eisenhower was president turned up as well. Why all the hoopla to see an academic speaking on a weekday evening? One word: pirates. People of all stripes love pirates. They simply can't get enough of these ruffians even though they have been gone from the scene for a couple of hundred years. Something about these rogues appeals to the American spirit, a spirit that also embraces the gunslinger of the Old West. We love the idea of rugged individuals living outside the norms of society, even if that life often led to a violent death at a young age. Look at all the films dealing with pirates and gunslingers, the most recent of which is "Pirates of the Caribbean" starring Johnny Depp. But the book I think Rediker's reputation will ultimately rest upon is this one, "The Many-Headed Hydra," written with fellow historian Peter Linebaugh.
Pirates ultimately play only a small role in this book. What we have here is an attempt to rewrite the entire history of the transatlantic region from a bottom up perspective. In other words, this book isn't a history of the monarchs of England, or the American Founding Fathers, or the merchants who owned the trading companies. It is a history of those too often ignored over the ages, those who toiled on the plantation, those who acted as foot soldiers in the armies of conquest, those who sailed the ships that brought slaves to the New World, and those held in bondage. It is a book about the men, women, and children who built the very tools necessary for the development and expansion of capitalism and colonization. It is a book about the nefarious "hydra," that mythic beast slain by Hercules and whose name the elites applied to anyone who dared challenge their authority. Francis Bacon wrote a treatise about this "hydra," arguing that they were subhuman "monsters" that the authorities should eradicate at the earliest opportunity. These wretches became the "hewers of wood and drawers of water," or peons good only for the basest labors.
The authors argue that several key factors played a part in the creation of this hydra. The most important was expropriation, that disastrous English policy that displaced thousands upon thousands of small farmers so that large landowners could fence in land, which led to such massive social unrest that the authorities had to do something about it. They chose to terrorize, to incarcerate, and execute those opposed to the new order. They also chose to ship many of these people overseas to use them as cheap labor to develop properties in the new world. The authors define subsequent events, everything from slave rebellions in Jamaica to a 1741 insurrection in New York, as class warfare between the poor and the wealthy. Members of the hydra (I should say heads of the hydra), according to the authors, always sought to unify their class interests in order to throw off the yoke of the oppressors. And the oppressors always managed to negate these attempts.
"The Many-Headed Hydra" is an enormous effort of scholarship, covering so many obscure events in British, Caribbean, and American history that the casual reader's mind will certainly founder under the onslaught of information. I'm a graduate student in history and I occasionally found myself looking up some of the events and people cited by the authors. Moreover, there are a couple of extraordinarily dense chapters examining how the hewers of wood and the drawers of water expropriated religion to their own class ends that will further boggle the mind. Not to worry, however, as the general themes of the book crystallize quite clearly through example after example of the attempted rise of the underclass and the subsequent crackdown by those in power. There are so many examples that follow this template that by the time the reader gets to the end of the book he or she is tempted to yell, "Enough already! I get the idea!" Eventual irritation aside, Rediker's and Linebaugh's book is an impressive reinterpretation of transatlantic history. It is also, unfortunately, rabidly left wing and biased. The following example will show the book's emphasis on underclass agency as well as its tendency to overstate its case.
Rediker and Linebaugh claim that impressment, that scurrilous activity effort by naval officers and ships' captains to forcibly coerce sailors into foreign service, was the key factor in starting the American Revolution. While it is no doubt true that the underclass in the American colonies had different beefs with their English masters than the colonial elites did, this book goes way too far in trying to show that the ENTIRE impetus for the revolution started with the underclass. According to the authors, colonial elites witnessing the riots started by disgruntled sailors and other "riffraff" were inspired to internalize this revolutionary fervor. Hogwash. All you need to do is go look for T.H. Breen's "Tobacco Culture," which successfully proved that wealthy colonial planters agitated for war because they owed so much money to English merchants that to stay within the British orbit would have ruined them. At best, we can say that BOTH the underclass and the upperclass had reasons to oust the British, and then went separate ways later. "The Many-Headed Hydra" is useful because it gives us another way to think about transatlantic history, but its one-sided arguments omit much.
A bottom-up theory of resistance.......2004-08-28
"The Many Headed Hydra" by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker is an exceptionally well-written and enlightening history of early capitalism. The authors offer a bottom-up theory of resistance and describe the conditions by which the modern nation state was founded as a solution to the problem of proletariat self-rule. Short narratives, biographies and illustrations of key events and individuals are framed within a discussion of the historical forces of the era, making the book an interesting, thought provoking and entertaining read.
Linebaugh and Rediker describe the brutal process of primitive accumulation where the poor were forced off the land to create the proletariat class. The newly-dispossessed were disciplined harshly and made to labor for the benefit of the investor class. However, the pervasive "culture of fear" that was "indispensible to the creation of labor-power as a commodity" eventually led to revolt, first with the English Civil War in the 1640s and later throughout the colonial system.
The authors spotlight individuals who made the case for the rights of all people, including Edward Despard, James Naylor, Tom Paine, Thomas Spence and Robert Wedderburn. These voices articulated the desires of the masses to achieve equality and social justice. As these rights were consistently denied, the seeds of discontent and rebellion were planted. When not organizing resistance against empire, many chose piracy, formed their own renegade communities, or chose to live among the Native Americans.
In this light, the authors present the American Revolution as a cooptation of the democratic movement. Capitalist property and wage relations were legislated in a manner that secured elitist privilege. Race, sex and class effectively served to split the proletariat into factions that could be politically controlled. The nation state thus was born as an instrument to empower the bourgeoisie and channel the energies of the masses towards capitalist accumulation.
The unique value of this book is its convincing argument that the world we know may have turned out very differently. This tantalizing possibility is just one reason why "The Many-Headed Hydra" is an intriguing read. I highly recommend it to all.
Empire Begins.......2003-10-12
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 designed to acquire and operate Atlantic markets." They note it was "the sailing ship -- the characteristic machine of this period of globalization -- combined features of the factory and the prison." Consider in this regard the famous 'tryworks" chapter in Moby Dick. They go on to say "ýIn opposition, pirates built an autonomous, democratic, multiracial social order at sea, but this alternative way of life endangered the slave trade and was exterminated." They note that connected with this counterrevolution from above, "a wave of rebellion ripped through the slave societies of the Americas in the 1730s, culminating in a multiethnic insurrectionary plot by workers in New York in 1741."
The final phase of their history tells the story of how the "motley crew" with Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica and a series of uprisings throughout the hemisphere created "breakthroughs in human praxis--the Rights of Mankind, the strike, the higher-law doctrine--that would eventually help to abolish impressment and plantation slavery." He suggests these rebellions also helped to produce the American Revolution, which, they claim, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation and citizenship to discipline, divide and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement."
After reading this eye-opening leftist history, the polyglot streets of New York, indeed of any port city on the Atlantic, suddenly make a lot more sense. Caught up in the brutal, enslaving machine of capitalism starting in the 1600s, the Atlantic and (and eventually) Pacific proletariat fought back against this deadly system of terror, enslavement and extirpation. And it clearly appears, with the assistance of this people's history of the American colonies, that the sons and daugthers of the hydrarchy are caught up now in just the latest model of Blake's dark, satanic mills, trapped and impressed into the vast, destructive combine of the corporate hegemon.
Too programmatically left wing in its somewhat idealizing potrayal of the rabble as a motley crowd who sought freedom from their enconomic enslavement, who practiced democracy and rebellion in reaction to the vicious disciplinary system of the ruling class? Perhaps, but not as tidy as those histories told from the top down which use the fumigated version of the historical record to tell those grand and increasingly obtuse stories of the birth of freedom, equality and opportunity for all.
Tremendously overrated.......2003-04-02
This is a deeply flawed book. It seeks to construct a radical reinterpretation of the early modern Atlantic world, one which privileges class conflict. To this end, it adopts a romantic, almost pre-Raphaelite vision of medieval European and Indian societies, and then recounts the destruction of those societies by the growth of capitalism. The authors' methodology is to comb through selected primary documents and secondary literature, picking out only those bits that fit the book's thesis. For example, they adopt the class elements of Edmund Morgan's analysis of Bacon's Rebellion (the part that has least survived subsequent scholarship) while doing their best to avoid branding the rebels with genocidal racism towards Indians, which Morgan (and every subsequent scholar) has argued drove the rebellion. Of course, presenting reinterpretations is the purpose of new scholarship, but the authors never actually make an argument or present evidence to justify their dismissal of these previous interpretations. The useful is recited, and the inconvenient is simply ignored.
The book is also awash in errors of fact, all of them conveniently aiding their argument. In fact there is often an interesting correlation between badly used evidence and a poorly referenced footnote. To take a few examples: the authors define antinomianism as the belief that God saves through a free gift of grace (perfectly orthodox Calvinism) and later as the doctrine that salvation occurs through faith alone (perfectly orthodox Protestantism). Their discussion of the Putney debates at one point quotes Thomas Rainborough so out of context as to reverse his intent, and the authors make a completely unsupported connection between the debates and opposition to African slavery. Their interpretation of the Antinomian crisis in Boston involves serious manipulations and omissions of evidence (ex. it is never mentioned that Captain Underhill, a commander in the Pequot War, was also one of Anne Hutchinson's followers; there is also no evidence for the authors' suggestion that the Hutchinsonians ever opposed the institution of slavery; and finally most of her followers were in fact merchants, not "proletarians"). While very much in the same school, the book lacks the subtlety and intelligence that E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill managed to give their finer works. In the end, the popularity of this book lies in its very polemical blindness. Like Wiccans reading Margaret Murray and feeling "it just has to be true," Marxists and anti-globalization protesters devour this book as a confirmation of all their own presuppositions. Evidence was never really necessary.
Book Description
In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost âcargo.â Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.
Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
Book Description
Hawthorne reevaluates long-held notions about the Atlantic slave trade's impact on a number of "stateless" - or decentralized - societies in Africa's Guinea-Bissau region. He shows that decentralized societies were by no means passive victims of the slave trade, as commonly depicted in the literature, but vigorously defended themselves from the incursions of the raiders. The imperatives of defense and their participation in the trade led to a fundamental reordering of decentralized societies, especially in the realm of agriculture and agricultural labor, as rice became the staple crop in the region. Contrary to standard interpretations, Hawthorne shows that rice production and capacities for self-defense actually led to population increases among the region's decentralized societies.
Customer Reviews:
A new look at the slave trade.......2004-04-28
Employing evidence from African oral traditions and European archival sources, this book looks at the slave trade in and from Africa in a new and unique way. Casting an eye toward the continent's decentralized societies, and most especially at the Balanta of the Upper Guinea Coast, Hawthorne demonstrates that those living outside states were not mere victims of enslavement and often found ways to produce slaves themselves. The book also challenges our view of precolonial women's history by arguing that in some places African men's work increased as a result of women being exported into the Atlantic. In the Balanta case, as the society turned to paddy rice production in the eighteenth century, young men assumed a much more central role in agricultural production. The book is mandatory reading from anyone interested in environmental, agricultural, gender, African or slave studies. It is well written and argued and might be considered alongside of the works of Walter Rodney, John Thornton, Joseph Miller, Martin Klein, Richard Roberts, and Paul Lovejoy.
Book Description
For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.
Customer Reviews:
Absolutely great book........2007-04-12
African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame
Fascinating material, but flawed writing style........2006-02-09
This book is quite enlightening in the history of the African slave trade. Contrary to what one might expect from the title and reviews, the author does not solely rely on oral stories from African elders. The stories that the author quotes, though, are always interesting. Especially, the Africans involvement with the slavery.
Of course, a story is just that, a story. As with many long told stories, there will be many aspects of truth and nontruth. That is not to say that any of the legends told were lies. They will contain versions of events as told by people who were not witness to the event. It is like the child's party game of "telephone." You start with a story at one end of the line and watch how it changes by the time it reaches the last person. Changes are inevitable, although, the basic premise may be intact.
Still, the author provides a useful addition to the literature. So often, the African slave trade discussion is limited to what occurred in America. This book provides stories and facts of the rudimentary aspects of the slave trade such as the problems with shippers obtaining insurance, and the changes in ships designs.
The book informed me on other aspects of the slave trade that I had not known. For example, the international outlawing of the slave transportation did not result in a lessening, but a sharp increase in Atlantic transportation of slaves. Also, the profits arising from slave trading after abolishing were far above what I would have expected. The author too was clearly stunned. That said, the major flaw in this book is that it is so dryly written. Her method of presenting the material is as if one were listening to a dictation. An odd presentation for such an emotional and significant topic.
A hard-hitting alternative history.......2005-07-04
There has long been silence on the issue of slavery and the Atlantic Slave trade: author Anne Bailey experienced this silence growing up in Jamaica, and as an adult became determined to break this silence, first researching the topic, than interviewing chiefs and elders in Ghana. African Voices Of The Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond The Silence And The Shame focuses on the Anlo Ewe community in Ghana to examine the impact of slavery and slave traders, showing how the trade became unpredictable and moved from the control of Africans to the control of outsiders. Oral narratives reveal why Africans began selling others into transatlantic slavery, providing a hard-hitting alternative history.
Average customer rating:
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The Atlantic Slave Trade: Nineteenth Century (The Atlantic Slave Trade)
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
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ASIN: 0754625826 |
Book Description
This survey synthesizes the economic, social, cultural and political history of the Atlantic slave trade. It details the current scholarly knowledge of forced African migration and compares this knowledge to popular beliefs. The book examines the 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade, covering the West and East African experiences and the American colonies and republics that obtained slaves from Africa, outlining common features and local variations. It discusses the slave trade's economics, politics, demographic impact, and cultural implications in Africa and America, places the slave trade in the context of world trade, and examines its role in the growing relationship among Asia, Africa, Europe and America.
Customer Reviews:
Short but insightful.......2007-10-04
The Atlantic Slave Trade is an important part of history of several nations: great part of Africa of course, the nations in America who were immmersed in this trade as buyers and those European countries who had control of the trade to its colonies. One important question that I had in my mind before reading this book was "why Africans were enslaved", curiously the first words of chapter 1, and why in this New World, the American Indians were not used as workers? Seems that everything conspired for this trading to flourish, in particular the decline of native population and because those native became new Christians. But seems there is another reason, not named in this book, and is that those native american were not that productive than Africans or Chinese.
This is a short book and the author provide an insightful introduction, focusing especially in the economic side of this trade and its organization, showing a great deal of statistical information. There is not much of the people side of events -- I am referring to the sufferings stories of the Africans, but it does name the story of Igbo Equiano, an African slave that wrote a book about his experiences and I'm eager to know more of it.
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