The Atlantic Roots of Working-Class Internationalism: a Historical Re-Interpretation
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THE ATLANTIC ROOTS OF WORKING-CLASS INTERNATIONALISM: A HISTORICAL RE-INTERPRETATION THIERRY DRAPEAU A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO DECEMBER 2014 © Thierry Drapeau, 2014 Abstract This dissertation offers a historical re-interpretation of working-class internationalism by situating its development within the early modern Atlantic-world economy (c. 1600- 1830). Through an exploration of various moments of insurgency and revolt of an emerging Atlantic class of workers, among them slaves, sailors, servants, and others, it demonstrates that profound and decisive traditions of proletarian solidarity across borders existed prior to the nineteenth-century classical age of working-class internationalism. In doing so, this dissertation alters the prevailing standpoint of the free, white, waged, industrial worker of Europe by bringing in that narrative the agency of the unfree, black (and racialized), wageless, plantation-slave worker of the Americas. Underpinning this intervention is a more generous and complex understanding of capitalism as a mode of production inclusive of unfree forms of labour. In order to recover and foreground early formative moments of working-class internationalism in the Atlantic-world economy, this dissertation proposes to re-theorize this development in terms of processes of transboundary proletarian solidarity in a longue durée frame. Rooted in a multidisciplinary framework of analysis situated at the intersection of Historical Sociology, Global Labour History, Atlantic Studies, and Social History, this strategy has allowed me to illuminate two world-significant moments of proletarian solidarity played out across colonial and imperial borders. The first is golden age piracy (1714-26), when thousands of insurgent seafaring workers of all nationalities revolted against capitalist exploitation at sea and took possession of their ships, instituting their own self-governments and creating multicrew alliances against imperial ii navies. The second moment expressing a durable process of transboundary proletarian solidarity is offered by the Saint-Domingue revolution (1791-1804), when thousands of African slaves rose up to overthrow slavery, leading to the formation of the first independent black republic in the Americas. This dissertation highlights that during the revolution, underground channels of communication entertained by black sailors and corsairs linked revolutionary Saint-Domingue to other slave revolts elsewhere in the Atlantic world, which cumulated in, and intersected with, the wake of working-class internationalism during the 1848 revolutions in Europe. iii Pour Valérie iv Acknowledgements My sincere thanks go first to my supervisor, David McNally. His enthusiasm, patience, and support have sustained me through many difficult times during the writing of this dissertation. David is a model of intellectual integrity and engaged, committed scholarship. I consider myself privileged to have benefited from his good guidance and mentorship over the past few years. I also want to thank my second committee member, Patrick Taylor, who contributed a great deal of time and effort to this project. I have learned much from his insights. Special thanks go to Pablo Idahosa, whose addition to my doctoral committee in the late stages of writing has proved essential for completing this dissertation. Many other committed and dedicated professors at York University contributed to this project by shaping my intellectual development in significant ways. I am most grateful to Kamala Kempadoo for having introduced me to the wealth of the Black Radical Thought, without which this dissertation would have been seriously in lacking theoretical foundation. I also want to thank two Sociology professors, Mark Thomas and Hyun Ok Park, who were the first to offer comments on this project when it was still in the form of term papers. I am also extremely thankful to the international community of scholars and students from other places and disciplines who have contributed to this project by listening to my ideas and sharing their thoughts when I presented my findings at scholarly conferences and meetings. Very special thanks go to two scholars, Colin Barker and John Charlton. After a somewhat laborious and jet-lagged presentation in Manchester in the spring of v 2009, where I first communicated my insights about this project, they both expressed great enthusiasm for my research and encouraged me to pursue it. In a way, the main ideas of this dissertation crystalized at a post-conference gathering in a Manchester pub in April 2009. I also thank Marcus Rediker at the University of Pittsburgh for he, too, expressed enthusiastic encouragements to pursue my research, as well as for putting me in contact with his talented students, from whom I learned much. I am especially thankful to John Donoghue who kindly allowed me to read chapters of his wonderful book before it went to press. This has contributed to strengthen my arguments presented in Chapter 3. I also want to thank Niklas Frykman and Isaac Curtis for having shared their thoughts on my project and for pointing out the existence of key sources. During the time when I was researching and writing this dissertation I was fortunate to receive financial support from the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. Their support was instrumental to the realization and competition of this dissertation. I also thank Judith Hawley, graduate program assistant in Social and Political Thought, who does so much with so little for SPTH students. Since my very first day at York, Judith has been extremely helpful and resourceful in helping me with administrative matters, especially in the last stretch of this dissertation. My years in Toronto would not have been the same without the friendship of the French Connection. Very warm thanks go to Thomas Chiasson-Lebel, Amélie Delage, Étienne Godard-Flamand, Frantz-Gheller, Priscila Guy, Claudia Hébert, Christine vi Henderson, Xavier Lafrance, Jonathan Martineau, Sébastien Rioux, Janick Roy, and Alexis Vaillancourt-Chartrand. In the past seven years and a half, each has, in distinctive ways, made me experienced life at its best and kept me from drifting into hopeless nerd- dom. But the French Connection means far more than the conventional bonds of friendship for me, as Alexis officiated my wedding and Amélie served as doula during the birth of my daughter, for which I will be forever grateful. I wish to express special thanks here to Sébastien who accompanied me throughout the writing of this dissertation, providing honest, insightful, sometimes ruthless, critiques that have influenced my thinking and helped me shaping my arguments, and to Xavier, whose encouragements and timely support in the last stages of writing proved critical for me to complete. I want to thank my parents for their encouragements and support during all those years. I thank my father, Jean-Guy, for keeping me grounded in real-life matters and for having indirectly taught me at an early age that a great deal of education can also happen at the université de la vie. I also want to express heartfelt gratitude to my mother, Nicole, who has always been there for me, proving it once again in the last weeks of writing this dissertation. She is a real model of perseverance, independence, and autonomy, which has shaped me until this very day. I am also thankful to the other members of my family and family-in-law who have shown interest in my work and who were always supportive during this long journey. Lastly, though it should have come first, I want to say with all my heart to my wife, best friend, and love of my life, Valérie Gingras, that I simply could not have written anything valuable about human solidarity without you by my side all this time during the writing of this dissertation. For nearly half my life now, you have been a true inspiration vii as a partner, and I cannot begin to express the admiration, love, and esteem that I have for you. As this long—very, very long—chapter of our life comes to an end, I look forward to embarking upon a new one with you and our little Juliette. I dedicate this dissertation to you. Now, for real: après ça, ça va bien aller… viii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii Dedication ......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. v Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Learning from Garibaldi: Toward an Atlantic Problématique ...................................... 4 Recovering Atlantic Internationalism in the Capitalist Longue Durée .......................... 9 Chapter Outlines ........................................................................................................... 16 1. Before the First International but beyond the Many-Headed Hydra: A Critical Historiographical Reassessment of Working-Class Internationalism