Book Reviews -James Sidbury, Peter Linebaugh ,The many-headed Hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 433 pp., Marcus Rediker (eds) -Ray A. Kea, Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic slave trade. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxi + 234 pp. -Johannes Postma, P.C. Emmer, De Nederlandse slavenhandel 1500-1850. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2000. 259 pp. -Karen Racine, Mimi Sheller, Democracy after slavery: Black publics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xv + 224 pp. -Clarence V.H. Maxwell, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume two: From the ending of slavery to the twenty-first century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. xv + 562 pp., Gail Saunders (eds) -César J. Ayala, Guillermo A. Baralt, Buena Vista: Life and work on a Puerto Rican hacienda, 1833-1904. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xix + 183 pp. -Elizabeth Deloughrey, Thomas W. Krise, Caribbeana: An anthology of English literature of the West Indies 1657-1777. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii + 358 pp. -Vera M. Kutzinski, John Gilmore, The poetics of empire: A study of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764). London: Athlone Press, 2000. x + 342 pp. -Sue N. Greene, Adele S. Newson ,Winds of change: The transforming voices of Caribbean women writers and scholars. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. viii + 237 pp., Linda Strong-Leek (eds) -Sue N. Greene, Mary Condé ,Caribbean women writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. x + 233 pp., Thorunn Lonsdale (eds) -Cynthia James, Simone A. James Alexander, Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. x + 214 pp. -Efraín Barradas, John Dimitri Perivolaris, Puerto Rican cultural identity and the work of Luis Rafael Sánchez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 203 pp. -Peter Redfield, Daniel Miller ,The internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000. ix + 217 pp., Don Slater (eds) -Deborah S. Rubin, Carla Freeman, High tech and high heels in the global economy: Women, work, and pink-collar identities in the Caribbean. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xiii + 334 pp. -John D. Galuska, Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the town and tell the people: Dancehall culture in Jamaica. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xxviii + 298 pp. -Lise Waxer, Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora. Chicago: Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 07:53:15AM via free access University of Chicago Press, 1998. xxxii + 510 pp. -Lise Waxer, Peter Manuel, East Indian music in the West Indies: Tan-singing, chutney, and the making of Indo-Caribbean culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. xxv + 252 pp. -Reinaldo L. Román, María Teresa Vélez, Drumming for the Gods: The life and times of Felipe García Villamil, Santero, Palero, and Abakuá. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. xx + 210 pp. -James Houk, Kenneth Anthony Lum, Praising his name in the dance: Spirit possession in the spiritual Baptist faith and Orisha work in Trinidad, West Indies. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. xvi + 317 pp. -Raquel Romberg, Jean Muteba Rahier, Representations of Blackness and the performance of identities. Westport CT: Bergin This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 07:53:15AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. PETER LINEBAUGH & MARCUS REDIKER. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 433 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00) JAMES SIDBURY Department of History University of Texas Austin TX 78712-1163, U.S.A. <sidbury @ mail.utexas.edu> Several years ago a colleague noted that postmodernism had turned the verb "to complicate" into the greatest compliment one can give when describing scholarship. He suggested that "complicating" a story might not always be an accomplishment, and that rendering a simple and unambiguous interpretation of the past can be a scholarly virtue. In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker reject the multiple subjectivities, ethnographic complexities, and supposedly-unavoidable ambiguities that mark studies of the "subaltern." Theirs is a straightforward story - a now old-fashioned Marxist morality tale - tracing an Atlantic revolutionary proletarian tradition across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their canvas is as geographi- cally broad as it is temporally expansive: the book focuses primarily on England and secondarily on North America, but ranges from seventeenth-cen- tury Naples to the British Caribbean and Haiti to West Africa. On that canvas they paint an allegory of the rise of global capitalism and the heroic emergence of a transnational, transracial, and gender-inclusive counter movement that sought to protect the egalitarian world of the commons against the grasping and exploitative Atlantic bourgeoisie. Linebaugh and Rediker build their analysis around the recurrent image of Hercules and the Hydra, a myth used by the ruling class in the age of impe- rial expansion "to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 07:53:15AM via free access 118 New West Indian Guide /Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 76 no. 1 &2 (2002) global systems of labor" (p. 3). They use this image to explore "multiplicity, movement, and connection" among members of "the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism" (p. 6). They begin with the famous Bermuda shipwreck that informed Shakespeare's The Tempest, uncovering there a struggle between the well-to-do castaways who sought to resumé their voyage to Jamestown, and the common seamen, religious radicals, and other hands who much preferred the idyllic and easy lives that they had stumbled upon in Bermuda to the lives of endless unrequited toil that awaited them if they returned to a life at sea or became servants in Virginia. Through the wreek of the Sea-Venture they introducé a story about "the origins of capital- ism and colonization," a story that is also "about alternative ways of living, and about the official use of violence and terror to deter or destroy them, to overcome popular attachments to 'liberty and the fullness of sensuality'" (p. 14). The book traces this story through different incidents, some famous and others obscure. First, the mam characters are introduced. Francis Bacon rep- resents the expropriators - expropriators "of the commons by enclosure and conquest, of time by the puritanical abolition of holidays, of the body by child stealing and the burning of women, and of knowledge by the destruction of guilds and assaults on paganism" (p. 40). Linebaugh and Rediker see Bacon advocating "several types of genocide, which found ... sanction in biblical and classical antiquity" (p. 40). The targets of Bacon's terror were the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" who responded by developing "new forms of self-organization" that were "alarming to the ruling class of the day" (p. 40). Linebaugh and Rediker assert that these working people and their struggles have been rendered "invisible, anonymous, and forgotten" by historians, and this book seeks to place them back at the center of the history of the Atlantic world. Both "improving" capitalists and radical proletarians were attracted to dis- senting religion and the Parliamentary side during the English Civil War. Linebaugh and Rediker see the New Model Army as a haven for those who rejected established forms of economie exploitation and expropriation as well as the home of the rising bourgeoisie. When, at the famous Putney Debates, Cromwellian defenders of property rights faced off against Gerrard Winstan- ley's Levellers who insisted that enclosure had to be stopped and that all English people had to be granted true freedom, the river of religious radical- ism split into two streams that flowed away from each other for the next two hundred years. One, the Revolutionary stream of the Levellers, flowed, the book argues, into the slave quarters of America, the regiments of oppressed Irish soldiers in the English Army, and the underground world of English urban workers. The "counterrevolutionary opposite" (p. 140) of that vision inspired those who organized the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of the American plantation complex while intensifying the legal and economie hold Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 07:53:15AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 119 of the ruling class over the lives of laborers in England. As the grip of capi- tal tightened, the revolutionary spirit that flowed out of Putney came to rest in the itinerant holds of British ships. Sailors were most subject to the discipline of capital and the state that represented it and became the multiracial and ever-moving repositories of resistance to that discipline. The egalitarian ethos of sailors, pirates, and dockworkers is portrayed as the key to a remarkable period of upheaval in Britain's American colonies during the 1730s and 1740s. That period witnessed a number of slave conspiracies and rebellions - some of them limited to slaves, but others like the New York Conspiracy of 1741 including f ree people of European descent. The very groups that sought to overthrow the merchants' control of New York are then placed at the center of the struggle for American independence, only to be displaced by the Thermidorian reaction of the Constitution. The struggle for antinomian democracy did not, however, disappear with the tri- umph of Madison and Hamilton. lts partisans continued to struggle through slave rebellions in the British Caribbean and the Haitian Revolution, through the efforts of British radicals to overthrow the repressive government of the lords and gentry, and in the guise of Robert Wedderburn's adaptation of rad- ical religion to working-class protest.