Many Headed Hydra

[Justin Schwartz]

Let me add my voice to the chorus in praise of The Many Headed Hydra. One of 
the coauthors, Peter Linebaugh, has a previous book, The London Hanged, that 
is the best thing on 18th century England since EP Thompson, whose student 
IU believe Linebaugh was. Linebaugh is not only a profoundly original 
historian of great technical skill and unsually large and radical vision, he 
is an exceptionally fine writer with a real feel for literature. The London 
Hanged, a survey of the social world of the English artisanal working class 
and the rule of capital through the lens of those of workers, artisans, and 
crooks hanged at Tyburn through the century, is built in part on a triope 
derived from Milton's Paradise Lost. You'd like it, Carrol. --jks


>
>Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> >[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

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