>[Every time I think Alexander Cockburn has lost his edge, he turns out
>another great column. ...]
<snip>
Let me assure you that the book is even better.
>Among those making their way down this same road 200 years ago to visit the
>great man was one of my favorite characters from the Revolutionary era,
>Constantin François Volney, whose career is freshly evoked in a wonderful
>book by my friend Peter Linebaugh (coauthor: Marcus Rediker), The
>Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of
the
>Revolutionary Atlantic, recently published by Beacon.
Interest declared: the coauthor, Marcus Rediker, is a professor and friend of mine who for several years has been the driving force behind the Western Pennsylvania Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Linebaugh and Rediker have a take on Atlantic history that even some of the most widely-read in the history of the period will find unique and engaging.
There's an especially interesting chapter on Col. Edward Despard, the British Jacobin who plays a starring role in E. P. Thompson's *The Making of the English Working Class.* Linebaugh and Rediker, while making clear their admiration for Thompson, implicitly criticize him for an analysis of capitalism's birth and the making of the English working class as a political entity which fails to take into account the entirety of the Atlantic in the birth of capitalism. As the marriage of Edward and Catherine Despard (a black woman from Central America) shows, there was a promising trend towards a multiracial revolutionary subculture in those years, which Linebaugh and Rediker argue was several centuries in the making (the narrative focuses on "the circulation of Atlantic experience" via a "motley crew" of sailors who carried rebellious news from one country to another). Yet anti-racism was subtly downplayed in the agenda of the London Correspondence Society (the LCS, the British equivalent of the Jacobins) as the 1790s wore on, and Linebaugh and Rediker draw attention to the fact that even Thompson did not understand the significance of this.
I'll stop rambling now. Really, you should read the book.
John Lacny