The Many-Headed Hydra

"This is a proper historical essay, written in the best Anglo-American tradition of historians like Eric Hobsbawm or E P Thompson. Marcus Rediker is an American and Peter Linebaugh is a British historian. I think these two historians represent the best of history-writing in English right now, together with other historians like Joanna Bourke. What they do sharply contrasts with the more mainstream and media-friendly revisionism of people like Niall Ferguson, so ‘embedded’ with power it provides the reader no critical distance whatsoever. On the contrary, Rediker and Linebaugh present the reader with another world, not a possible world, but one that was already; the taking place of that world – in the Caribbean, in between Britain and the Americas – constitutes a memory that is being recognised today by the grassroots movements and peoples I speak of in my book, who are trying to lead the world in a different, more humane, direction. Linebaugh was called by historian Robin Kelley ‘the most important historian living today’. I tend to agree with him and you can see why in this book. Marcus, on the other hand, is an equally skilled historian who has broken a new path in the writing of the history of modernity by concentrating his penetrating gaze and archive-research skill on the high seas; that is the story they tell in this book. It is all about the dominion over the seas. Globalisation and world power meant that from the very outset of modernisation, liberty and freedom could only be understood in the context of and through the lives of those crossing the seas. These were slaves, sailors, women and displaced commoners forced to migrate from Britain and Africa to the Caribbean. There, they encountered the interrupted thought of Amerindians, and went through a process of ‘inner conversion’ that culminated in the invention of the language that we now know as ‘human rights’, a justification of revolt, and an inter-cultural view of the world, and of nature, that changed the world forever during the cycle of revolutions and struggles for independence in the Americas that started in 1741 and came to an incomplete end between 1801 and the 1830s. The American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and the independence of the Americas are a direct result of the lives and deeds of these peoples, as they invoked the memories of the past in order to project into the future a prophetic vision of freedom and equality. The book argues that the long history of resistance to globalism has been unjustly ignored. Linebaugh and Rediker take a second look at key episodes of that history. Many of the characters that Rediker and Linebaugh speak of parade throughout my book. And their intention of finding these characters who care less about their identity over national particularity and much more about what makes us human illuminates my own writing; it is also a theme of the next book."