> Thanks for the name of the the Linebaugh book. David
> Brion Davis's review was certainly explicitly right
> wing or anyway overtly anticommunist in a startlingly
> old fashioned way, but my recollection was that he
> many telling, and if valid fatal, objections to the
> book, including that Linebaugh didn't address the
> supposedly well-known mostly fictional status of a
> well-known slave narrative that is central to the
> book. This isn't my area, and I liked the idea of the
> book, but the review worried me a lot.
I'm reading Many Headed Hydra Now and took a look at the David Brion Davis piece. It almost doesn't appear to be about the same book. The focus on slavery in the Hydra is really marginal, though I admit I'm only done with the first half. One of the more interesting things they try to prove is that slavery gets raced rather late in the game. Religion certainly has something to do with it, but they have some really interesting analysis about how the distinction in race is only really evident after something like 1658. In this, they don't argue that there wasn't what we might consider a racial or ethnic component to enslaving Africans, but that until around that time, the idea of white supremacy wasn't really part of it. It was simply a transaction which usually involved people who looked a certain way. It only became racialized in the way that we understand in apparent fear of there being revolt of both white and black slaves in the New World colonies.
But, again, this is really only part of what the book is about. I think it is fair to say that sometimes they play fast and loose with the people who they lump together under the term "proletariat" but the concept of the Many Headed Hydra isn't one they invent to talk about the underlings of the early 17th century, they quote extensively from people like Francis Bacon and other defenders of the emergent capitalist English order. In Davis' review he chastises them for discussing a "supposedly unified Hydra whose interconnections evaporate upon serious scrutiny." But the point Linebaugh and Rediker make is that the "unified Hydra" was problematic precisely because it wasn't unified. It was many headed and the problem was that there were so many pesky people around who refused to adhere to this new order. There are times when they might get a little absorbed in the poetics of the imagery and the way the beast is discussed, but there is plenty of evidence for the claim they make. In fact the point so far seems to be that it was recognized that if the whole order had to be defended against a united "hydra" it would be difficult to defend--ideologically or forcefully--and so there was concessions made to the "free Englishmen" as being somehow better than what were, basically, their fellow slaves who happened to be from places where people had more melanin in their skin.
As for the slave narrative he talks about, it certainly isn't central to the first half of the book since I've not gotten to that part yet. But most of the review seems to be an attempt to cause the death of a thousand cuts. Being, as he is, constantly SHOCKED at how they have the wrong date on two pages. TWO PAGES! Have the ever heard of an editor. And, since the review is both of _Hydra_ and another book that is strictly about the slave trade and an African abolitionist movement that started there, his approach is basically to say how bad Linebaugh and Rediker were since they obviously hadn't read the book that had been published at the same time as theirs. (he also pretends to cite extensively from another book that had only recently been published, David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, but it seems he mostly had to rely on sending the author e-mails to get his spin in the Hydra, since half of the page number citations are accompanied with the caveat "e-mail from the author." At one point he allows them some sympathy for not being both historians and time travelers ("They may have finished their research too late to be aware of recent discoveries") but for the most part he just belittles them and begins from the premise that Linebaugh is a bad historian, mostly ignoring Rediker as someone who's ever published something before.
Davis really seems to be arguing against a premise that wasn't really in the book. Namely that Europeans invented slavery. It's one of those weird obsessions here for him to point out over and over that NOOOO it was those Arabs--they were the ones what did it first! And the Africans! They weren't socialists--they were barbaric slave traders. Hyperbole used here to concentrate the amount of the review he spends making this point. Then it goes like this: The British just spent a tiny amount of time trading slaves and eventually realized their mistake and tried to get rid of all the slaves by setting up a good colony with a "Saxon constitution" in Sierra Leone (they had learned how to return slaves to their origin because they'd had to do it something like it [???] SOOO many times before when the evil Muslim states had captured Europeans as slaves . America did the same in Liberia. But these just didn't catch on because the natives were so barbaric. The ones who were finally Christianized (the movement the other book, by Lamin Sanneh that is reviewed) were able to take positions of leadership in these possible utopias, but alas, now we have Charles Taylor who, evidently is somehow a homegrown baddie.
He tries to make all of this sound so centered and rational, but in the end, he just sounds like he's providing yet another tired account of how slavery might have been bad, but, hey, Africa is a f%^ked up continent. And the Muslims were there first! The points he makes about Hydra (the book) may stick, but it is telling that, though he provides footnote citations from the other book he's reviewing--along with many others along the way--he does them no such favor, even when he quotes them directly.
I don't know if the book is flawless, but whatever problems Davis brings up are hardly damning. And in any case, it is pretty obvious that it is an account of history which Davis finds completely abhorrent regardless of the facts involved. He ends the section of the review on them by saying, "They end with a reference to recent resistance to wage slavery in Seattle, as well as Africa and the Caribbean, thus reminding readers of the latest of Hydra's heads. They seem to imply that the modern heroes are isolationists and protectionists, not those citizens of the third world who think that free trade will improve their longevity and living standards." Ah yes, Free Trade. Something which it was clearly easy to take a completely unnuanced position on in those early days of the '00. It's just good, like apple pie. Lets give a shout out there for all the "heroes out there" defending it.
The review itself is locked behind an electronic gate, but the response from the authors and then from Davis give a pretty good sense of the tenor of both the book and the review.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14534
Davis may produce great work, but this review really does seem to be motivated by whether or not he likes someone's argument from the outset. His tone in the review is pretty much identical to the response-but only when he's discussing _Hydra_. The other guy, even when he "repeats a common mistake" is given a nice, glowing review--though the basic premise of the book barely appears in the review. Davis is just obsessed with it as a source of the facts which he likes to cite--so much so that he seems to think his focus early on is about the other book, when it's really just bathing in this account he loves to teach people about since they are so misguided about the European roots of slavery.
Thanks for the recommendation Andie. It was good to know about this exchange over the book. It should give a good background to reading the second half.
s