Marcus Rediker

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

History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade

Abstract This essay explores the role of sharks in the Atlantic slave trade. It draws on the testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and passengers to assess abolitionist claims that sharks followed slave ships across the Atlantic and feasted on human remains thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The essay concludes that the abolitionists were essentially right and that the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of terror utilized by the slave ship captain. The abolitionist image of the marine predator in turn added effective horror to what would become a successful public agitation against the slave trade.

The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion, 1839

T his essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the uprising possible. The essay concludes by discussing the process of mutiny, suggesting a six-phase model for understanding the dynamics of shipboard revolt, and showing how such events can have powerful historical consequences.

Colloquy with Marcus Rediker on The Slave Ship: A Human History

On the last afternoon of the Society of Early Americanists’ most recent biennial conference, sixty-plus colleagues gathered to hear an interdisciplinary panel of scholars focusing on historian Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History. In accepting my invitation, Rediker had agreed to be one voice among several, rather than serving simply as the respondent. Four of the participants in this follow-up roundtable were each very much a part of that session: Emma Christopher, Sean Goudie, Marcus Rediker and Karen Salt had each agreed to make a brief opening statement describing issues and questions that the book raises, which they hoped the audience and panelists would then discuss. The two other participants here, Ned Blackhawk and William Boelhower, were not at the table, but each has agreed to participate in this continuation of that afternoon’s conversation. Indeed, once the discussion began, Professor Blackhawk raised the stakes by bringing up the Barry Unsworth novel Sacred Hunger and, along with it, issues of genocide that involve Native Americans who were living, and dying by the hundreds of thousands, during the period that The Slave Ship historicizes. The other panelist here had originally been on the panel (as had Vincent Carretta) but was not able to be at the conference. Upon returning from Bermuda, I contacted him and described how substantive, and at moments moving the discussion had been; when I asked if there might be space in the pages of Atlantic Studies for a follow-up article along the lines that the roundtable had laid out, he agreed. He also agreed to contribute the commentary, here, with which he would have participated in that afternoon’s opening comments. The following comments serve, then, as a richly fleshed-out version of what one would have heard in early March 2009 at that session in a hotel in Bermuda, in the middle of the metaphorical space that Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach have taught us to see as the Black Atlantic and the circum-Atlantic. Each of these participants has continued reflecting on the book The Slave Ship and on ways it helps us place the eighteenth century’s Atlantic slave trade in a perspective that has meaning in our time. A significant difference here is the addition of the comments by Professors Boelhower and Blackhawk, comments that frame those by panelists Goudie, Salt and Christopher (which appear, here, in the sequence in which each one spoke at the colloquy). Another difference is that, this time around, Marcus Rediker has agreed to contribute a coda, drawing on the others’ observations and expanded comments.