70. King v. Wedderburn, TS 11/45/167 in McCalman, ed., “Horrors of Slavery,” 125.
71. The Axe Laid to the Root, no. 1 (1817); McCalman, “Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism,” 112; Julius S. Scott, “A Perfect Air of Slavery: British Sailors and Abolition,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author. Fora useful debate on workers and abolitionism, see James Walvin, “The Impact of Slavery on British Radical Politics, 1787–1838,” in Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden, ed., Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 343–67; Patricia Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform,” in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkstone: Archon Books, 1980), 297–311; Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery.
72. Walvin, “Impact of Slavery,” 346; M. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 200.
Conclusion
1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), book 5, chapter 1, part 3, article 2; and Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), chap. 14, 476, 549.
2. Thomas Bartlett, ed., Life of Wolfe Tone (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998), 437.
3. Gwyn A. Williams, Search for Beulah Land (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 71.
4. Rights of Nature (1796), in Gregory Claeys, ed., Political Writings of the 1790s (Brookfield, Vt.: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 4:407.
5. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787, 1791), 36–37. In 1934 Samuel Beckett translated an article during the anglophone moment of négritude: “If the race of Negroes should happen to disappear tomorrow, no doubt, their absence would be deprecated by the white man; as transatlantic stokers, as hewers and carriers of water it would be a matter of some difficulty to replace them.” See Nancy Cunard, The Negro Anthology (London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart, 1934), 580.
6. Brit. Lib., Add. MSS 33122 (Pelham Papers), “Minutes Relating to the Trial of Col. Despard.”
7. Joan Dayan, “Haiti, History, and the Gods,” in Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Developments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 83ff.
8. Francis Midon, The History of the Rise and Fall of Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples (1729), 204–5.
9. Lura Pedrini, Serpent Imagery and Symbolism: AStudy of the Major English Romantic Poets (Utica, N.Y.: State Hospitals Press, 1962), 31.
10. A Social History of England (London: Penguin, 1983), 198; Agrarian Justice (1795).
11. See Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1991).
12. The address is reprinted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), 199–202. Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Cast and His Times, (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University, 1979), 68, 182. Peter Gaskell described the factory proletariat as “but a Hercules in the cradle,” in The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), 6.
13. William Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
15. Olaudah Equiano, The interesting Narrative and other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), 38.
16. T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), 302.
17. M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925).
18. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: A History of Black People in England (London: Pluto Press, 1984).
19. R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 348; Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: University of Cork Press, 1996), 100.
20. Nini Rodgers, “Equiano in Belfast: A Study of the Anti-slavery Ethos in a Northern Town,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 80.
21. Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy (London, 1832), 8–9.
22. Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty; British Democratic Movements at the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
23. State Trials for High Treason, part 2, The Trial of John Horne Tooke (1794), 53.
24. John Wilson, ed., The Songs of Joseph Mather (Sheffield, 1862), 63–66.
25. Roy Porter, Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
26. As we read in the “Original Letter Book of the Corresponding Society.” British Library Add. MS. 27, 811, The Place Papers, fols. 4v–5r.
27. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Aholition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975), 276.
28. Lydia’s letter is quoted in Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1Slavery,” 0–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 39. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 429–39; Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 136, 140.
29. R. Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 159.
30. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 238. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 84, 220, 229; J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1Slavery,” 7–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 3.
31. Carl Ludwig Lokke, “London Merchant Interest in the St. Domingue Plantations of the Émigrés, 1793–1798,” American Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1938): 799–800.
32. Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community, and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265.
33. T. B. Howell, ed., State Trials 25:1099.
34. C.F. Volncy, The Ruins, Or, Meditation of the Revolutions of Empires: and The Law of Nature (reprint, Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1991), 66.
35. Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the LCS 1792–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), entry for April 1798, 435.
36. A. Ruy, A primeira revoluçao social brasiterta 1798 (1942), quoted in R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1809 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 2:512.
37. The Patriot, 21 May 1793; Gwyn A. Williams, “Morgan John Rhys and Volney’s Ruins of Empires,” Bulletin of Celtic Studies 20 (1962); Whelan, Tree of Liberty, 63, 78, 80.
38. Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France in 1802 (London, 1802), 2:328; C. F. Volney, The Ruins: Or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 146–48. Thomas Jefferson translated the first twenty chapters, which formed the basis of Joel Barlow’s translation of 1801–2. Jefferson asked Volney to burn the manuscript of his translation. See Glilben Volney et l’Amérique (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universiry Press, 1923), 110–11.
39. Volney, The Ruins, 39.
40. This is from the 1795 translation, page 29, rather than the 1802. translation.
41. Jean Gaulmier, Un Grand Témoin de la Révolution et de l’Empire: Volney (Paris: Hachette, 1959), 21.
42. James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 50–51, 160, Adams quoted at 162; James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1976–1826 (New York: Norton, 1995), vol. 2, entry for 3 May 1798.
43. Erdman, Blake; and John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam—Transcribed for
the First Time from the Original 1790 Manuscript, ed. Richard Price and Sally Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
44. Stedman, 359.
45. E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993), 212.
46. William Wells Brown, The Black Man. His Antecedents, His Genius, His Achievements (1863), 32–33. Almost half of the fourth chapter consists of footnotes substantiating the proposition that civilization began in Africa. Otherwise, American editions expunged the priority that Volney gave to African civilization. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” Brecht asked in his poem “A Worker Reads Histoty,” on the aftermath of the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. George W. Williams coined the expression “crimes against humanity” advancing Volney’s dearest cause.
Acknowledgments
OUR COLLABORATION ORIGINATED at a conference on “The World Turned Upside Down,” held in 1981 with the assistance of the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies in honor of Christopher and Bridget Hill. We furthered the collaboration at subsequent conferences, in Miami, Baltimore, Claremont, Milan, Atlanta, New Orleans, Halifax (Nova Scotia), Boston, Moscow, Chicago, Amsterdam, London, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Durham, and Los Angeles. We thank those who organized the meetings and those who commented on our work. We also thank Bryan Palmer and Gregory Kealey, who gave us an opportunity to publish some of our early findings, and the Midnighr Nores Collective, which helped us to think. We thank those whose kindred projects have been so important to us: Julius Scott, Robin D. G. Kelley, Robin Blackburn, Michael West, Paul Gilroy, Susan Pennybacker, James Holstun, Dave Roediger. Thanks to Staughton and Alice Lynd and the Youngstown Workers’ Solidarity Club. We thank the comrade remembrancers who passed on before we finished: John Merrington, George Rawick, Raphael Samuel, Edward Thompson, Jim Thorpe, Gwyn Williams. We thank especially our colleagues at Beacon Press: Edna Chiang, always helpful; Dorothy Straight, for gracious and meticulous copyediting; and our editor, Deb Chasman, who first contacted us about this project seven years ago, and since then has given it her catalytic intelligence, energy, humor, and wisdom. We are deeply grateful.
I, Peter Linebaugh, thank family—especially Grandmother Jean, Nick and Joanne, Andy and Linda, Lisa and Scott, Dave, Tom and Charlotte, and Kare—ever ready with the jolly boat. Thanks to Janet Withers and her hospitable moorings. Thanks to Denis and Edna for showing the chalk cliffs again. Thanks to Dan Coughlin and Dave Riker for labor at the capstan, “La Ciudad,” and shanties of parting and welcome. Thanks to Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Nancy Sheehan, John Willshire, Nancy Kelley, Monty Neill, and Massimo De Angelis for their heave-ho! Thanks to Bettina Berch for hospitality behind the cays of Belize. Thanks to Riley Ann, a seasoned shipmate from the Caribbean Sea to the Irish Sea, and to Michaela Brennan who hauled side by side in Spanish Town, Belize, the British Museum, Dublin, Kew Gardens, and Chancery Lane, where we dove together into archival waters. “History from the ground up” includes the bump of irreverence, and she found Despard’s ancestral home through a laugh and a word with the shoemaker of Mountrath.
I thank the Fulbright Travel Fellowship for visits to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia in 1982, where I saw the southern sky and the Hydra. Thanks to support at the University of Toledo from the College of Arts and Sciences and the History Department, particularly from Carol Menning, Al Cave, Roger Ray, and Ruth Herndon, as well as Abdul Alkalimat of Africana Studies and the Black Radical Congress. Thanks to my students Ty Reese, Jeff Howison, Jason Hribal, and Manuel Yang, who scrambled nimbly in the shrouds and manned the hand-pumps. Thanks to the History and Literature Department of Harvard College, especially Janice Thaddeus, Noel Ignatiev, Brenda Coughlin, Jonathan Taylor, and Philipe di Wamba. Great sailors! Closer to the harbor, at University of Massachusetts, special thanks to Richard Horsley and Charlie Shively for clear bells in foggy conditions. In Boston thanks to Carol Flynn and her quadrant and Edward Kamau Brathwaite and his conch. Thanks to Bill Jones, Bill W., and my friends at Grace. Thanks to helpers and critics Iain and Gillian Boal of the Retort Group in Berkeley, Philip Corrigan, Jim Holstun, Rip Lhamon, Jr., Jo Stanley, Lew Daly, Winston James, Alan Dean Gilbert III, Deborah Valenze, Steven Colatrella, Marty Glaberman, Ferruccio Gambino, Olivia Smith, and Dorothy Thompson. Thanks to John Roosa for work in the Burdett Papers at Oxford. Thanks to Peter King for help with the Assizes Records. Thanks to Yann Moulier Boutang for De l’esclavage au salariat: Economie historique du salariat bridé (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). Thanks to Kevin Whelan for introducing the Green Atlantic, and to Luke Gibbons, Tommy Graham, and Daire Keogh, who welcomed me to the fellowship of ’98 and the Bicentenary Conference in Belfast and Dublin. Thanks to Robert Scally of Irish House at New York University, Alf Lüdtke and Hans Medick of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, and Richard Price and Sally Price in Martinique.
Gracious thanks to Glyn Duggan for help in the muniments room of the Broadmead Baptist Church in Bristol; to the Venerable H. H. J. Gray, St. Peter’s Mountrarh, Co. Laois, Eire; to the Reverend D. Vidler, Priests House, Putney, London; and to J. Joseph Wisdom, the librarian of St. Paul’s Cathedral, for their generosity with their records and knowledge. Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. M. H. Despard, Chelsea, London, for permission to use the Despard Family Papers. Thanks to the staffs at the Boston Public Library, Arlene Shy at the William L. Clements Library (University of Michigan), the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the Institute of Historical Research (London), die Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Malcolm Thomas at the Friends Library (London), the Detroit Public Library, the National Archives of Brazil (Rio), the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Jamaica (Kingston) and the National Archives (Spanish Town), the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (Belfast), the Rylands Library in Manchester, the Bodleian at Oxford, and the special collections of the university libraries of Toledo and Notre Dame.
I, Marcus Rediker, join Peter in thanking the people and institutions above, and I add to the list the many helpful folks at the Public Record Office of Great Britain, Chancery Lane and Kew Gardens, the British Library and Manuscript Collections, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Virginia State Library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and the Hillman and Darlington Libraries at the University of Pittsburgh. Thanks, too, to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation, and the University of Pittsburgh (especially the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund) for grants that supported the project.
Thanks to the friends who have generously helped me over the years: Joseph Adjaye, Reid Andrews, Ira Berlin, Eric Cheyfitz, Jim Collins, Susan G. Davis, Seymour Drescher, David Goldfrank, Graham Hodges, Shan Holt, David Johnson, Paula Kane, Jesse Lemisch, John Markoff, Gary B. Nash, Robert Resch, Rob Ruck, Satan and Adam (Sterling Magee and Adam Gussow), Sharon Salinger, Dan Schiller, Hisham Sharabi, Richard Sheldon, Dale Tomich, Judith Tucker, Daniel F. Vickers, Shane White, Alfred F. Young, and Michael Zuckerman. Thanks to Norman O. Brown, who after long discussion of the Atlantic proletariat remarked happily, “Eppur si muove!” Thanks to my gang, the members of the Working-Class History Seminar in Pittsburgh: Wendy Goldman, Maurine Greenwald, Michael Jimenez, Richard Oestreicher, Steven Sapolsky, Csaba Toth, and Joe White. Thanks to my students past and present: Thomas Barrett, Thomas Buchanan, Alan Gallay, Gabriele Gottlieb, Douglas R. Egerton, Rick Halpern, Forrest Hylton, Maurice Jackson, Craig Marin, Margaret McAleer, Charles Neimeyer, Scott Smith, and Cornell Womack, whose own work has been an inspiration. Thanks to the motley Free Mumia crew, and in particular to Mu himself, who encouraged this project by letter, by intense discussion in the tiny visitor’s cubicle at SCI-Greene prison (Waynesburg, Pennsylvania), and by his example of thinking freely, courageously, and joyously though incarcerated on death
row.
And finally, special thanks to my wife, Wendy Goldman, who helped to make the book possible, not least by reading endless drafts and saying what she really thought, which was not always what I wanted to hear. Thanks, too, to Ezekiel and Eva, and to brother Shay ne. My mother, Faye Ponder, did not live to see this book completed, but I nonetheless want to say to her, in memory, that the circle is unbroken.
Index
Please note that page numbers are not accurate for the e-book edition.
Page numbers for illustrations appear in italic
Abyssinia Baptist Church, 334
Act Concerning Aliens of 1798, 344
“Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, An”
(1705), 138
“Act for the more effectual suppression of
piracy,” 149
Act for the Settlement of Ireland, 121
Act of Trade of 1696, 149
Act of Uniformity (1662), 73
“Act to Restrain the Wanderings of Servants
and Negroes, An,” 126
Adams, John, 2, 224, 232, 234, 237, 240, 344
Adams, Samuel, Jr., 216, 217, 218
“Address of a Journeyman Cotton Spinner,”
333–334
Address to the People of Ireland (Russell), 278
Advertisement Touching an Holy War, An
(Bacon), 37, 39, 61
Africa, 41, 82, 91, in, 128, 170. See also West
Africa
African Americans: diaspora of, 266–267;
excluded from revolutionary settlement,
267; fighting press-gang, 228; identity,
origins of, 213; jubilee and, 268, 296, 297,
300; religious beliefs of, 282; slavery and,
213–214, 227, 239; as vector of revolution,
242, 247. See also Africans
African Baptist Church, 334
African Institute, 302
African National Congress, 41
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 49
