Marcus Rediker: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (CUP, 1987).

Marcus Rediker with Peter Linebaugh: The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000).

Marcus Rediker: Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004).

This review first appeared as “Different War, Same Old Battle: Marcus Rediker’s Histories of Pirates, Slaves and Rebels,” in Overland Issue 181 (Summer 2005), 46-49.

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Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750  
Marcus Rediker

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Marcus Rediker with Peter Linebaugh

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
Marcus Rediker

Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney

In November 1717, a motley crew of condemned men stood on the gallows in Boston, Massachusetts, awaiting execution, Before the public spectacle came to a grisly conclusion, noted New England cleric Cotton Mather announced that "All Nations agree to treat your Tribe, as the Common Enemies of Mankind, and [to] extirpate them out of the World". Mather's sermon was part of a lurid and violent multi-national propaganda campaign that aimed to demonise opponents of the emerging 'Nations' of the Atlantic world. The hangings were part of an international effort to organise and carry out a campaign of terror and extermination against these 'common enemies'. Some of those 'enemies' were only recently in the employ of the nations who now condemned them - as official 'privateers'. They were now 'pirates' - who stole property, resisted Jaws, and threatened the new social order. The rulers of the nation states had declared war upon them. Pirates, in turn, laughed in the face of death: "A merry Life and a short one," was the common refrain, as they "wip'd their backsides" with the decrees of the Admiralty.

In Villians of All Nations, his latest book, Marcus Rediker vividly recounts the story of this early War on Terror, exploring the 'Golden Age' of Atlantic piracy between about 1716 and 1726 when perhaps as many as four thousand pirates swarmed the seas of the mighty Atlantic. This was the age of the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger, and swashbuckling romanticised figures such as Welshman Black Bart Roberts and Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. This was an era when cross-dressing women such as Mary Read and Anne Bonny fought for a 'Life of Liberty' alongside fellow pirates and found immortality in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, in John Gay's sequel to the Beggar’s Opera, and perhaps even in Eugene Delacroix's famous painting, Liberté Guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the people). This was the infamous generation of pirates that has inspired legendary tales from their day to ours; from Robert Louis Stevenson's Long John Silver in Treasure Island, to Johnny Depp in Pirates Of the Caribbean.

But if Rediker is keen to exploit our eternal fascination with this generation of pirates, his purpose is as deadly serious as the violence and the hangings that almost invariably ended the lives of so many of those involved. Indeed, Rediker, who has been an outspoken activist in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty in the barbarous nations where it still exists, is passionate about recovering the daily realities of the lives of pirates, and understanding what moved them to virtually suicidal acts of crime and violence. For this is a bottom-up history of an extraordinary kind. We see here in vivid detail the terror and violence meted out by ship captains to ensure the smooth operations of commerce, including the safe transportation of enslaved Africans. We see here the deadly working conditions that sailors and seamen had to endure on merchant and naval ships, and which ultimately drove many to mutiny, or to voluntarily join attacking pirate ships. Even as he was about to be hanged, pirate William Fly sent out a warning to all ship captains that they learn from the murder of his own captain to "pay Sailors their Wages when due, and to treat them better", announcing that "their Barbarity to them made so many turn Pyrates". We also see in amazing detail the starkly different shipboard reality often created on board pirate vessels. We see here multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-national pirate crews constructing their own distinctive egalitarian societies, electing their officers, and dividing their plunder equitably, in the process - as Rediker concludes - challenging and subverting "prevailing conventions of race, class, gender and nationality, and posing a radical democratic challenge to the society they left behind". Pirates most overtly and most flagrantly, however, challenged the rights of those who held mercantile property.

Such challenges, of course, could not go unanswered. And so a broad coalition of the willing began forming around 1716 - a less motley coalition of merchants and ministers, kings and governors, lawyers and judges, publicists and writers - to wage a campaign to "cleanse the seas". Seeking to obliterate rather than understand the pirates who plagued their trade, they quickly created, through proclamations, legal briefs, petitions, pamphlets, sermons, and newspaper articles, a demonised image of the pirate that would "legitimate his annihilation", in Rediker's words. Indeed, only a few years after most European nations had sanctioned and commissioned privateers to do their bidding against each other in the War of Spanish Succession (which came to an end in 1713), those same nations turned their propaganda, laws and guns against some of the same men who now acted beyond the bounds of law. After offering pardons, ruling groups launched their own campaign of terror - with more vigilant naval patrolling, and ever-greater numbers of spectacular executions.

The tragic irony, of course, was that one of the prime reasons the political-military-legal establishment wanted to obliterate piracy was to protect the slave trade from Africa to the Americas. Pirates such as Bartholomew Roberts devastated the fledgling slave trade between 1716 and 1722, ranging up and down the African coast, "sinking, burning, and destroying such Goods and Vessels as then happen'd in [their) Way," striking a "Pannick into the Traders'" according to one naval surgeon. Pirates also led bold assaults against slave-trading fortresses on the coast. They were not as much interested in capturing slaves as in capturing the big, sturdy, seaworthy and well-armed ships that carried them, as well as the gold and silver at the castles that paid for them. Leading slave traders and slave owners struck back, petitioning tile Admiralty and even the King for help. They also used political connections to get more men-of-war to the African coast-to protect the slave trade against the "terrour of ye Pirates".

The War against Terror came to a frenzied climax in 1722, when the Royal Navy captured two of Black Bart Roberts' ships on the coast of West Africa. On the gallows at Cape Coast Castle, the infamous slave-trading factory that served as a staging post for thousands of enslaved Africans about to be forcibly shipped to the Americas, fifty-two members of Roberts' crew were hanged in front of a motley concourse of Europeans and Africans. Young and old were put to death and, according to one report, most met their fate with little fear, and no tears. To capitalise on the occasion, the authorities hanged the men under their own flag, the Jolly Roger, and turned their corpses into a "Profitable and Serviceable Spectacle" by distributing them up and down the African coast to broadcast the grisly message: terror would be fought with terror. After piracy was effectively suppressed by 1726, the slave trade flourished, and England especially consolidated its position as the leading European slave-trading nation - a position it would hold until 1807.

Of course, the war on pirates was only one manifestation of a larger conflict between the forces of capitalism and the Many-Headed Hydra. As Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have shown in their previous work, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulties of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labour, from the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialisation of the early nineteenth. As merchants, manufacturers, planters and royal officials of northwestern Europe were fond of noting, the Herculean task of organising the production and transportation of bullion, furs, fish, tobacco, sugar and manufactures, was only made harder by the Hydra-like resistance of the men, women and children from Europe, Africa, and the Americas whom they put to work as "hewers of wood and drawers of water". No sooner had one strike been put down, when another slave rebellion and mutiny began. Hercules, symbolising economic development, had to work tirelessly to put down the hydra, symbolising disorder and resistance - a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.

In the Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Rediker and Linebaugh trace this story of the early origins and rise of Westem capitalism, but they trace it unashamedly from the perspective of the sailors, slaves, pirates, labourers, "blackymore maides" and indentured servants who were pressed into service to construct the new Atlantic world. From this perspective, Rediker and Linebaugh discover the threads of a new Atlantic working class that developed its own agenda and countered the increasingly state sanctioned use of terror to enforce the appropriation of their lands and labour with a fusion of old and new forms of terror of their own. Thus it is that we find connections between the methods and ideology of resistance among the Levellers of the English Revolution and the oppressed and landless in far-flung Naples, Ireland, Barbados, Virginia and the Gambia River within the space of a few decades. As quickly as the Atlantic littoral was brought under the heel of merchant-capitalists, these connections grew more extensive, sophisticated, and expansive, culminating in the sharp universalist edge of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and the rising abolitionist movement. And, of course, it was the sailors, soldiers, and slaves who plied the Atlantic seas and who quite literally worked the engines of the developing capitalist order that helped create and nourish those connections of resistance.

As one of the leaders of a new generation of scholars interested in a more international social history and in re-invigorating a class-centred approach to the history of the early modem world, Rediker is not without critics. Indeed, though his work stands at the centre of a revival of interest in the 'Atlantic world', more conservative leaning scholars keen to celebrate Atlantic connections and the rise of 'Westem civilisation' have virtually ignored Rediker and Linebaugh's monumental challenge. Replicating the divide between ship captains and seamen, between slaves and masters, between traders and labourers, many historians of the Atlantic world today are too busy focusing on merchant communities, the creation of colonial Creole elites, and the transmission of 'enlightened' ideas to notice or acknowledge that their story actually mirrors the one told by Rediker and Linebaugh. When they have, they have dismissed the work as fanciful. The divide between the New Left and the New Right historians seems as wide as the contemporary political divisions that plague us. At stake is a very different version of history, a very different view of contemporary issues, and a different kind of hope for the future.

Critics complain, for example, that the connections drawn between various disaffected groups and classes are tenuous, and point to the fact that pirates preyed on ordinary people too, not just ship captains and merchants. Pirates themselves did sometimes concede that there were no clear boundaries in a war of total destruction. Shortly after the hangings in Boston, pirates who were still at sea vowed to "kill everybody they took belonging to New England". Edward Teach, the infamous 'Blackbeard', and his crew burned a captured ship "because she belonged to Boston alleging the People of Boston had hanged some of the pirates". But as recent events have reminded us, violence begets violence, and terror - practised by all sides - knows no bounds. Relatives of the young Brazilian man shot seven times in the head by London police at point blank range were made to swallow the lesson of "collateral damage" just as surely as were the families of Muslim victims of the World Trade Centre and London bombings. Indeed, Rediker's seemingly obvious conclusion in Villains of All Nations- that terror breeds counterterror, and only leads to vicious cycles of violence - is a lesson still unlearned. A young British teaching assistant, Mohammed Sidique Khan, has just reminded us of that fact, even as Tony Blair and John Howard continue to deny that the unlawful invasion of Iraq has been a cause for the continued escalation of violence and terror.

In a similar vein, critics also complain that Rediker and Linebaugh read too much into the motives of their subjects - that they take their subjects too seriously. Many historians have for too long been content with the nameless, faceless anonymity of the eighteenth-century crowd, or 'mob'. Rediker and Linebaugh give the mob names, faces, and voices, and try to understand their actions on their own terms. What they find when trying to understand the rationale for those actions makes us deeply uncomfortable, of course, because it forces us to acknowledge the original violence and terror perpetrated by those who enclosed the commons, financed slaving voyages, and gave orders to discipline sailors and suppress rebellions. It forces us, in other words, to acknowledge the depth and scale of the historic violence that gave rise to capitalism and imperialism.

Such a bloody history makes us deeply uncomfortable. And given historians' reluctance to talk about this dimension of our shared past, is it any wonder, then, that today's Western leaders remain thoroughly uninterested in acknowledging both the particular motivations of our new 'terrorists' and by extension, our own complicity in the deep and long-term historic violence that helped create these responses in the first place? As John Howard asserted at a press conference with Tony Blair on 21 July, "We lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances ..." But as we learn more of the identities of the London bombers of 7 July 2005, we realise with horrifying clarity that the current 'war on terror' and polarisation of views has only provided yet another cause for disaffected, poverty stricken and racially abused youths to rally around.

Echoing Howard, Cotton Mather and the other royal officials, governors, attorneys, merchants, publicists, clergymen and writers who helped wage war against the pirates and 'cleanse the seas' with an unmatched ferocious efficiency, were not particularly interested in what motivated the "Vermin", the "Sea-Monsters" the "Enemies of Mankind" that roamed the seas. The coalition of the willing were unable or unwilling to do much more than censure the captains of ships who oiled the engines of their commerce with the blood of the labour of sailors and slaves, precipitating the flight of many into refuge on board pirate ships. Only after being forced to listen to the defiant death speech of convicted pirate William Fly did Cotton Mather concede that perhaps ship captains had been complicit. He admonished the captains among the crowd that had gathered for the hanging to avoid being "too like the Devil in their Barbarous usage of the Men that are under them and lay them under Temptations to do Desperate Things". He could, however, afford to be a little more magnanimous: this was 1726, and Fly was one of the last pirates hanged in a different War against Terror. At what point in this new War on Terror will we stop to think?

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