[lbo-talk] Linebaugh (Was Re: decoupling)

[Jesse Lemisch]

The title you are looking for is Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The
Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon 2000). Though subject to criticism in various
ways, it's an excellent book, which I've always thought of as a kind of
Bottom-Up version of Robert R. Palumer's Age of the Democratic Revolution,
describing the movement of radical ideas via the groups named in the title.
It's possible that David Brion Davis's NYRB review made some good points,
but I recall it as a hideously political review from the right. For a
publication that pretends to a certain hipness, NYRB's stable of reviewers
in US history is amazingly archaic and out of touch: Gordon Wood, Davis,
Edmund Morgan, and til his death, Vann Woodward. The distance between the
often (well, sometimes, good) material elsewhere n NYRB and its incredible
backwardness in US history is almost a repeat of the "two cultures" problem.

Andy, can you give a citation to your piece critical of EP Thompson on
"exterminism"?

Jesse Lemisch

----- Original Message -----
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
To: "lbo-talk lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 12:18 AM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Linebaugh (Was Re: decoupling)


>
> I love Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged, which is
> perhaps the only really EP Thompsonesque book to
> follow very closely but imaginatively in the path the
> EPT indicated for modern history.
>
> However David Brion Davis really took apart at the
> joints Linebaugh's co-authored book on the
> trans-Atlantic shipping economy, class struggle, and
> the slave trade. I am very much more inclined to be
> sympathetic to Linebaugh than to Davis, but you should
> read his NYRB demolition of that book, which I use to
> have but the title of which escapes me. The Many
> Headed Beast or something like that. I am no expert in
> the field, but unless Davis is just lying that work
> was a real disaster. Linebaugh is even crankier than
> Thompson -- I have an exceedingly cranky response from
> ETP to a historical materialist (as I saw it) critique
> I made of his "exterminism" theory of the cold war
> from back in the early 80s --so it should be
> interesting to hear what Linebaugh has to say about
> Davis.
>
>  Nonetheless I am eager to read anything Linebaugh
> writes, and Magna Carta is especially topical these
> days, since it is being trashed.
>
> In a note to my Evidence class I quoted in Latin and
> modern English the provision on trial by a jury of
> one's peers, since the students are becoming lawyers
> they should be exposed to some Latin.
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Jan 30, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> >
> > > Martin Wolf (FT), who -- I believe -- is somewhat
> > sensitive to the
> > > broader interests of "global finance" makes a
> > rather distressed
> > > exhortation for those countries to decouple.
> >
> > By the way, I recorded an interview with him this
> > morning which I'll
> > run on the radio tomorrow - along with Peter
> > Linebaugh, talking about
> > his new book on the Magna Carta.
> > ___________________________________
> >
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
>
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