#42,
(historio)Graphical (2)
Outwith the Whale
As
an English undergraduate at
Linebaugh,
Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed
Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary
There
are some critics who believe that Herman Melville originally intended Moby-Dick to be an adventure/romance
about Ishmael and Queequeg whaling on the high seas. But somewhere along the way the whale
surfaced and became, in a way, as much Melville’s obsession as it was
Ahab’s. The relevance of this point to a
review of Peter Linbaugh and Marcus Rediker’s splendid work, The Many-Headed Hydra, may be unclear,
but on reading this Atlantic history this reviewer was struck that its main
heroes are as multiethnic as the Pequod’s crew, and that without Moby-Dick,
this is perhaps how Melville’s story might have looked – a story of
“sea-Parisians”[1] turning
the world on its head.
We
can refine this line of thinking further if we place George Orwell’s 1940
essay, “Inside the Whale,” alongside Moby-Dick.[2] Here we find the world swallowed up by the
forces of totalitarianism, and the only course for the intellectual is one of
quietude sitting within the whale (or one of Lady Astor’s cottages on the Isle
of Jura). Continuing along this tack
further still, we find E.P. Thompson penning a persuasive rejoinder to Orwell,
locating a mooring for the left-wing intellectual “Outside the Whale,” outside
NATO and the
Once
the Berlin Wall had come down, of course, things looked very different. Orwell’s Winston Smith suddenly appeared to
be freed from his shackles, and the world seemed able to swim free of the
whale. For Thompson, however, the kind
of protest he had led and those he had outlined in his historical writing now
appeared less momentous, as no more than manifestations of the whale that had
just departed. Moreover, the “English
peculiarities” that had seemed worth valorizing in opposition to Stalinism and
NATO, now seemed to evaporate in light of a growing awareness of empire. It now became very evident that empire had
been absent from Thompson’s The Making of
the English Working Class and that the nature of English-ness itself was up
for grabs in the face of a continuing influx into Britain of former colonial
subjects.[4] The very fact that Salman Rushdie (who in
many ways heralded the new British literature) would announce that the whale
actually did not exist at all is very suggestive of the new post-Orwellian and
post-Thompsonian zeitgeist taking
shape.[5]
But
wait. If this whale does not exist (and
possibly never did), perhaps we can nonetheless go back and look for the bits
of the story that Thompson missed and develop a new narrative of protest that
is Thompsonian still. This narrative
will have all the trappings of gender and race that Thompson was criticized for
ignoring, and these trappings will not undermine the class narrative, rather
they will bolster it. The narrative,
moreover, will not be confined to
Well,
this is what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have achieved for us. Their
Thompsonian credentials are certainly impeccable: Linebaugh worked with
Thompson on Albion’s Fatal Tree,
while Rediker incorporated a healthy dose of Thompsonian analysis into his saga
of 18th-century seamen and pirates, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.[7] They have married their strengths in this
text, and have relied on their enviable ability to follow every strand of protest
into every tavern of every Atlantic port, to create a clear picture of a world
of protest that has been hitherto almost completely ignored by historians. The strengths of this text are such that it
deserves every bit of the acclaim that Thompson’s Making received when it first appeared, not just for the story that
it tells, but also for its path-breaking contribution to comparative history,
showing how American history might be internationalized better than any
manifesto or blueprint could do it for us.[8]
Linebaugh and Rediker take the reader through two
centuries of revolutionary activity carried out by the motley crew (multiethnic
groups of laborers with connections throughout the Atlantic world). Throughout the work they use the metaphor of
Hercules and the many-headed hydra to connect the disparate and, until now,
separate movements. This metaphor had a
great deal of currency at the beginning of their period, particularly in the
work of Francis Bacon who described the monstrosity and terror likely to
emanate from the lower orders.
Manifestations of the hydra could be found in the wreck of the Sea-Venture and the attempt to establish
a counter-colony on Bermuda, providing grist for Shakespeare’s tempest turned
mill; or in the many Anabaptist women leading congregations during and after
the Civil War who endeavored to transcend barriers of race, gender, and class,
but who would be persecuted during the period when criminalization of women in
England and Europe peaked, and “as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and
witchcraft reached their highest rate.”(p. 92)
The
Putney debates, pitting mutinous soldiers led by Thomas Rainborough against
Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and other leaders of the New Model Army, were
always a key concern for New Left historians like Christopher Hill and Henry N.
Brailsford.[9] In Linebaugh and Rediker’s hands, they are
reinvigorated through a focus on Rainborough’s concerns about enslavement, both
of free-born Englishman and Africans, the right to vote, and colonial
liberation. Royalists would assassinate
Rainborough and his reform impulse would be quashed, both in the campaign to
conquer and virtually enslave the Irish and in the growing slave trade that
triangulated
The
story continues with a Rediker-driven section, outlining the emergence of the
The 1741 slave uprising in New York City is then given
the Atlantic make-over, the authors attributing the event to a motley crew of
soldiers, slaves, and sailors who came from a variety of places (Ireland, the
Caribbean, and Africa), and beginning along the city’s docks, where the
waterfront taverns entertained the dispossessed of all colors and
backgrounds. Like the pirate ships, the
waterfront was noted for being a place where the “outcasts of the nations of
the earth” sang, drank, and danced in an ethnic stew of solidarity against
their masters.
Next,
the authors take aim at the American Revolution, painting a picture of a
radical movement that would be betrayed and or contained by less radical
elements. Most of what is good in the
revolution is tied to the motley crew, while all that is less appetizing has
its roots elsewhere. Here, Thomas
Jefferson acknowledges the significance of the motley crew, but fearing its
challenge to his vision of
The
last two substantive chapters return the reader to the metropole, with the city
of
But
what of the whale in this saga of resistance – is it really as inconsequential
to the story as Linebaugh and Rediker make it seem? Of course, they note the presence of the
In
addition, the
One
example of this can be found in the treatment of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy
of 1822. The authors follow the accounts
developed in the court record as presented in Designs against Charleston,[10]
to assert that the revolt “expressed the power of transatlantic
pan-Africanism.”(p. 299)
One should not rush to endorse Michael Johnson’s recent assault
on the old conspiracy thesis, yet it has to be acknowledged that the anxieties
of the
In
light of this, we should note the potential difficulty involved in trying to
expand the Thompsonian project, giving agency to the motley crew throughout the
Atlantic World. The words of
anthropologist David Scott should resonate here: “What is at issue is not whether the colonized accommodated or
resisted. What is at issue is how (colonial) power altered the terrain on which
accommodation/resistance was possible
in the first place.”[14] Agency and protest may be a constant, but
their meanings may be altered utterly – and a terrible beauty be born. But, this large blubber-encased caveat
notwithstanding, you’ve got to love this work.