Lex Heerma van Voss

Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction *

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the * The papers presented in this volume are the outcome of two conferences. The first was organized by the editors and Emma Christopher and held on 16–18 June 2011 at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The second was organized by the editors and held on 21–22 May 2012 at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859013000497 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 08 Dec 2019 at 15:54:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutionary era until now. The practice of mutiny is as old as warfare itself, but the concept and the word are of more recent provenance. Etymologically, mutiny derives from the Latin motus (motion or movement), which spawned the French word émeute (riot) and the German word Meute (mob), which in turn gave rise to Meuterei, the Dutch muiterij, the French mutinerie, and soon thereafter the English mutiny. The initial meaning of the word was diffuse, suggesting a general state of tumult, unruly discord, and social disturbance, but during the ferocious wars that tore apart the continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mutiny affixed itself more specifically to the collective rebellions that erupted with growing frequency inside Europe’s hugely expanded armed forces. The Spanish army of Flanders, a massive force of 70,000 men, appears to have been especially afflicted, suffering no fewer than 37 major mutinies between 1589 and 1607, many of them lasting for multiple years and involving between 3,000 and 4,000 soldiers each time. Mutiny thus entered Europe’s military vocabulary at a time when nascent nation-states began to transform their armies from chaotic collections of drifters, forced recruits, feudal retainers, and paid mercenaries into the standardized, tightly organized, and highly hierarchical warmaking machines of the modern era. As part of this military revolution, war-workers were deskilled and turned into replaceable cogs through a program of extensive drilling based on the time and motion studies carried out by the Dutch military pioneers Maurice and William Louis of Nassau, subsequently refined and implemented with deadly success by the legendary Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus. in The Hague. The first conference was funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Institute of Social History, the University of Pittsburgh, and Stichting Professor van Winterfonds. The second conference was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, and Stichting Fonds voor de Geld– en Effectenhandel. We thank these institutions for their hospitality and generosity and the participants at both conferences for their comments on the papers. 1. Geoffrey Parker, ‘‘Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army of Flanders 1572–1607’’, Past & Present, 58 (1973), p. 39. 2. Idem, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 16–24. 2 Frykman, Anderson, Heerma van Voss, & Rediker of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859013000497 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 08 Dec 2019 at 15:54:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms At sea, the process of military standardization lagged behind by a few decades, but as European powers expanded their professional war-fleets in the second half of the seventeenth century they imposed naval articles of war to create the same strictly hierarchical form of organization that had already transformed their armies. All traces of collective decision-making, long a prominent element of North Atlantic maritime culture, were obliterated. The result was a micro-society that resembled tyranny in its purest form: ‘‘All that you are ordered to do is duty’’, an old salt advised the landsman Ned Ward at the turn of the eighteenth century. ‘‘All that you refuse to do’’, he continued, ‘‘is mutiny’’. The authoritarianism of the militarized work environment, which leaves no formal room for opposition short of all-out mutiny, explains in part why mutinous soldiers and sailors have repeatedly been in the most radically democratic, most militantly anti-imperialist vanguard of the great revolutionary movements that have thundered across the world in recent centuries: New Model Army mutineers at Putney in the midseventeenth century; sepoys at the start of the Indian Uprising in 1857; insurgent sailors at Kiel, which triggered the revolution that toppled the German Kaiser in 1918; seamen at Kronstadt who in 1921 challenged the increasingly authoritarian rule of the Bolsheviks; or, most recently, American GIs who, with their mass refusals, marches, protests, and anti-officer violence (‘‘fragging’’), undermined the war effort in Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Until recently, the scarcity of reliable data has made it seem nearly impossible to estimate the actual incidence of mutiny during the age of sail. The events themselves are notoriously underreported, shrouded in ‘‘a double conspiracy of silence’’ since no one involved had an interest in their involvement becoming known – for officers it might result in a career-ending stigma, for the mutineers themselves in a life-ending sentence. As a consequence we must assume that extant evidence represents only a small proportion of actual events. And yet, where quantifiable data has been uncovered and analyzed, the results have been perfectly astonishing. New work has revealed previously unknown 3. Quoted in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 211. 4. James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, 2000), pp. 192–256; C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 6; Michael Epkenhans, ‘‘‘Red Sailors’ and the Demise of the German Empire, 1918’’, in Christopher M. Bell and Bruce A. Elleman (eds), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (London, 2003), pp. 80–105; Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ, 1970); David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago, IL, 1975). 5. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ, 2012), pp. 8–9. Introduction 3 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859013000497 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 08 Dec 2019 at 15:54:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms mutinies and other forms of resistance in the Indian Ocean convict trade. Recent research in North Atlantic naval archives meanwhile suggests that at least one-third of European warships experienced some form of collective rebellion during the 1790s. Perhaps even more impressively, the comprehensive Transatlantic Slave Trade Database demonstrates that approximately one in ten slave ships experienced a mutiny, some of them successful, most suppressed. The essays collected here build on such work, demonstrating unambiguously that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries – not just warships, but convict vessels, slave ships, and merchantmen, sailing in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas – all experienced far higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. The authors range across global contexts: exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, and offering a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. They make clear that we must take seriously seaborne voyages as spaces for incubation and as vectors for diffusion of political radicalism. In this respect, the volume uses evidence of shipboard mutiny to rethink the relationship between sea and land, as well as to foreground the era’s multiple geographical centers and logics of resistance from below. We contend, in other words, that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. And, in understanding the global and connected character of the age of revolution, as well as its maritime and subaltern dynamics, we seek to decenter Europe and North America in our analysis and also to rethink the era’s temporality, which, these essays suggest, stretches at least into the 1850s. M A R I T I M E R A D I C A L I S M Mutiny is part of something bigger and broader, what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in th

Provisions for the elderly in north-western Europe: an international comparison of almshouses, sixteenth–twentieth centuries

In Early Modern north-western Europe a unique form of charitable foundation developed - almshouses. These were inhabited by elderly men and women, who had led honourable middle-class lives, but had become unable to support themselves. In towns that were rapidly growing through immigration, many elderly people were without income or family support. The masses of the working-class poor had to resort to outdoor relief and other survival strategies or were confined in old peoples homes and hospitals. Almshouses, in which residents could maintain their privacy, autonomy and honour, were a viable middle-class alternative. We argue that this type of provision could rise especially in relatively urbanised, monetised north-western Europe. Here, wage labour was the dominant form of income; nuclear families the prevalent family type, and rich citizens had great interests to invest in building religious and urban communities. Around the North Sea, dependent middle-class elderly could entertain early notions of individualism and privacy, which were not catered for by charitable institutions elsewhere.In Early Modern north-western Europe a unique form of charitable foundation developed – almshouses. These were inhabited by elderly men and women, who had led honourable middle-class lives, but had become unable to support themselves. In towns that were rapidly growing through immigration, many elderly people were without income or family support. The masses of the working-class poor had to resort to outdoor relief and other survival strategies or were confined in old peoples homes and hospitals. Almshouses, in which residents could maintain their privacy, autonomy and honour, were a viable middle-class alternative. We argue that this type of provision could rise especially in relatively urbanised, monetised north-western Europe. Here, wage labour was the dominant form of income; nuclear families the prevalent family type, and rich citizens had great interests to invest in building religious and urban communities. Around the North Sea, dependent middle-class elderly could entertain early notions of individualism and privacy, which were not catered for by charitable institutions elsewhere.

Working on Labor

Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.

Whither Labour History? Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives

The change around 1960 was quite striking, though it had been anticipated by the launch of the Amsterdam Institute’s International Review of Social History in 1956. The Feltrinelli Institute began to publish its Annali in 1958. In Austria, an association of labour historians, Verein für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, was born in 1959. In France, Le Mouvement Social [y] began its current career under Jean Maitron in 1960. [y] The SSLH was founded in the same year as the journal Labor History in the USA, a year before the (socialdemocratic) Friedrich Ebert Foundation began its Archiv fuer Sozialgeschichte and two years before Labour History was launched in Australia.