Review: The Many-Headed Hydra

An article from Do or Die Issue 10. In the paper edition, this article appears on page(s) 322-329.

Review: The Many-Headed Hydra

The Many-Headed Hydra:Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
By Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (Verso, 2000)
Hardback/433pp/£19/ISBN 1 85984 798 6

"Who are the oppressors but the Nobility and Gentry; and who are oppressed, if not the Yeoman, the Farmer, the Tradesman and the Labourer? ... your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity; yea, in brief, your honouring of them, dishonoureth the commonality... Unlord those that are lorded by you."
- Ranter Laurence Clarkson, 1647 (p. 81)

The Many-Headed Hydra is a long awaited (almost 20 years in the making) tour-de-force of radical history from below. Avoiding the usual categories that constrain history within the limits of the nation state, the authors take an internationalist approach in order to study the way people have fought against these categories and have tried to escape from and resist states by moving across borders and organising across races.

Nowadays when globalisation is the buzzword most used to understand capitalism, it is worth remembering that capitalism has always been global. Linebaugh and Rediker make this point by referring to the Virginia Company - the origin of English imperialism - as a "new world-trade organization". (p. 15) This book is about the origins of capitalism in the first wave of globalisation in the 17th and 18th centuries and about the resistance that it encountered. At school we are taught about the great era of exploration and discovery - we are not taught about the slavery, genocide, and exploitation that it entailed, nor about the mutinies, slave revolts and runaway maroon communities of ex-slaves that resisted it.

The authors' contention is that the 'discovery' of the Americas signalled a new stage in human history. It kick-started capitalism, launched global maritime trade, created the biggest movement of peoples in history and transformed the world. They take this as their starting point and focus on the resistance to this new globalisation. They then follow the thread of this resistance and the twists and turns it makes up to the point which normal 'labour history' tends to take as its starting point.

Thus The Many-Headed Hydra is a book of Atlantic history - about the three-way traffic between Africa, America and Europe. Everyone is familiar with the famous triangular slave trade which built the fortunes of Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. But it is inevitable that not only slaves, sugar and tobacco travelled on the ships. News travelled too - underground news of slave revolts, of revolutions in Haiti, France and America; new ideas and new tactics. People travelled too - radicals who had stirred up trouble in England were transported overseas and spread their ideas, while travellers who had seen in the indigenous peoples of the Americas that a free life in harmony with nature was possible, brought their ideas back to Europe.

Linebaugh and Rediker use a few particular episodes and a few individual people to draw out a series of themes that permeate the whole book. They do this successively, using one telling episode to make a wide range of points. And they find a series of metaphors that recur throughout the historical period they're looking at. Chief among these is the myth of Hercules and the hydra, which was continually used by ruling class propagandists as a way of explaining the difficulty of their task of forging an empire. One of the twelve labours of Hercules was to slay the monstrous hydra, a snake-like beast with many heads. Every time he cut one off, another two grew in its place. He eventually killed it by using fire to seal the severed stumps, thus preventing the heads from regrowing. The Anglo-American ruling class saw themselves as Hercules trying to discipline rebellious subjects that would simply re-appear in new and more threatening forms every time they seemed to have conquered them. The building of empire was a 'Herculean' task and at every turn they were confronted by new manifestations of their amorphous enemy - pirates, rebellious slaves, independent women, religious radicals, 'war-like' tribal peoples... "the rabble", which "like a Monstrous Hydra" would "hiss against their Soveraigns Regal Power and Authority." (p. 29)

Enclosure

The history of the ruling-class Hercules' struggle with the hydra of resistance is driven by four central themes that determine the whole period covered in the book: enclosure, terror, co-operation and resistance, and the struggle for alternative ways of life.

The central thing that governs it all is enclosure or expropriation. It is the enclosure of common lands in England, beginning slowly in the late Middle Ages and then rapidly speeding up through to the mid-18th century that provides the essential historical basis for capitalism. To get the poor to work, you had to take away their land. Once the land was denied to the people, they had no choice but to work, making money for the owners of the plantations, ships and workshops. Huge numbers of displaced people were redeployed overseas to populate the colonies. The main argument advanced by the propagandists of English colonialism was that colonisation would provide a way for England to rid itself of the "swarmes of idle persons" enclosure had produced. (p. 16) The separation of the people from the land in England was mirrored overseas as the Irish were dispossessed, Africans enslaved and Native Americans displaced.

May Day 1640: At the outbreak of the English Revolution, 'prentices and seamen break open the prisons and storm the Archbishop of Canterbury's house in Lambeth.

Enclosure and the vast changes that were taking place in society (the beginnings of industrial exploitation, a huge military mobilisation) prompted massive and gloriously-named rebellions across the country as handicraft workers and peasants sought to preserve their old ways of life: the Beggars' Christmas Riot of 1582, the Plaisterers' Insurrection of 1586, the Felt-Makers' Riot of 1591, the Southwark Candle-Makers' Riot of 1592. Those who resisted enclosure, tearing down the fences and filling in the ditches were for the first time called Levellers.

Terror

This resistance to enclosure naturally imsplied a response: terror was used to make possible the basic conditions for capitalist development. At home, in the colonies and at sea, gruesome punishments were enacted to keep the poor at their work, prevent the spread of radical ideas and prevent colonists running off to join the enemy.

Transportation to the colonies was a punishment and one which not only kept the poor in their place but also profited the state, rather than costing it anything. The conquered Irish, as well as Gypsies and Africans were forcibly deported out of England. Thousands upon thousands of those found guilty of even minor crimes were transported to the colonies. In a sermon of 1622, John Donne promised that the Virginia Company would "sweep your streets, and wash your dores, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons, and imploy them: and truely, if the whole Countrey were such a Bridewell [prison], to force idle persons to work, it had a good use." (p. 59) As the authors point out, the propagandists and planners of colonisation wanted America to function as a prison.

However, it was not a prison from which escape was impossible. English soldiers and settlers in the new plantations in Ireland would regularly run away to join the Irish. And in the New World, settlers in England's Virginia colony refused to work, mutinied and "did Runne Away unto the Indyans". In 1611 some of these renegades were recaptured. Sir Thomas Dale, the governor of the colony "in A moste severe mannor caused [them] to be executed... Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death." The purpose of this was "to terrefy the rest for Attemptinge the Lyke." (p. 34)