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· 274 ratings · 14 reviews
Start your review of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Non ten unha coma mal colocada.
Fascinating to see how certain techniques and contours of class struggle emerge out of the wooden world Rediker narrates, the sometimes fatal discipline of captains, the sailor's drive toward autonomy, dignity, and, well, getting paid, fed, and not dying. The weight and granularity of the evidence Rediker employs for captains', press gangs', and courts' direct and indirect violence against sailors help him frame struggles on ships and in harbors as nothing less than class war during a period of Fascinating to see how certain techniques and contours of class struggle emerge out of the wooden world Rediker narrates, the sometimes fatal discipline of captains, the sailor's drive toward autonomy, dignity, and, well, getting paid, fed, and not dying. The weight and granularity of the evidence Rediker employs for captains', press gangs', and courts' direct and indirect violence against sailors help him frame struggles on ships and in harbors as nothing less than class war during a period of growing wealth in the English empire (1700-1750). The term "class war" can seem like hyperbole, but here, if anywhere, it rings true with "crow-shredded corpses of seamen" lining the Thames, Captain's beating sailors to death with crude implements, or starving them to death to line their pockets. It is no wonder the term "strike" emerges from this milieu as sailors would collectively agree to stop the work of the ship by striking the sails. Related claims: 17th + 18th c British sailors are among the earliest groups of "collectivized labor" (78), the immense powers of the captain "made the ship one of the earliest totalitarian work environments" (212). Reading these accounts also reminds me of how the most often reported forms of workers suffering in American industries are often indirect--work regimes so intense people have to piss in bottles, a door locked while the plant burns (not the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the 1991 Hamlet fire)--meaning it is harder to hold those who cause this violence responsible. Then again, squint a little, and there's plenty of direct violence in the modern workplace, some of it sexual, some of it in the gray spaces of farms that employ migrant workers--plenty of stories of supervisors beating up workers there. I digress.It is against this violent discipline that Rediker narrates the flourishing of piracy in the first half of the 18th C. Sure, the pirates life was often short and violent, but, in his account, it was more egalitarian politically and economically and its rewards possibly far greater. Critics have labelled Rediker's account of pirate communities as uncritical and overly romantic; Rediker w/Linebaugh double-down and nuance things a bit and take into further account gender and race and maroon spaces in The Many Headed Hydra. My skepticism in regard to the books emphasis on piracy as it concludes is that though piracy represented a major, worker-led rupture with the order merchant captains, their bankrollers, and the Royal Navy wished to impose on the seas, it overshadows other far more frequent but less dramatic forms of struggle that have actually survived or been adapted by subsequent workers and worker movements. But maybe that's the point: we can understand this period best through the extremity of the struggle between captains and crews and the exceptional nature of some sailors responses.
Some stray thoughts:
Rediker poses sailors as a trans-national vector of anti-hierarchical, class-consciousness but the evidence here seems speculative at best. Wondering if anyone has tackled this at greater length.
Though Ned Ward delivers up spicy lines like "For everyday [the] sailor shits upon his own grave," I sometimes looked askance at Rediker's reliance upon this satire writer as a source. Am wondering if it is treatments such as this that move writers like Hester Blum to more strictly use the writings of sailors themselves as evidence.
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I read this book closely followed by author Marcus Rediker's later and more specific work, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age." This is such wonderful labor and maritime history. The two books taken together (but especially "Between the Devil..") are like the "Caliban and the Witch" of Atlantic anglo-american seafaring and piracy from 1700-1750. The earlier of these came out in 1987 or something, so I am almost certain that it influenced Silvia Federici in her own offer I read this book closely followed by author Marcus Rediker's later and more specific work, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age." This is such wonderful labor and maritime history. The two books taken together (but especially "Between the Devil..") are like the "Caliban and the Witch" of Atlantic anglo-american seafaring and piracy from 1700-1750. The earlier of these came out in 1987 or something, so I am almost certain that it influenced Silvia Federici in her own offering of insurrectionary history penned by a rather UN-orthodox marxist (one of my favorite sub-genres of history).No big summary today but just a comment or two. Rediker thoroughly illuminates the origins and conditions of "early modern" seafaring in the age of European empires and their "explorations." He explains the merchant ship as a proto-typical "factory" where hired hands were among the first in all the world to sell their labor for a wage in the novel relation of mercantile capital to dispossessed proletarians (rather than for a share or as part of a paternalistic or reciprocal relationship of production with a feudal lord or master). Like Federici's "Caliban..," Zerzan's early labor history essays in "Elements of Refusal," this work provides crucial insights into the nature and dynamics of the emergent world capitalist system and, ultimately, the civilization from which it springs. He shows how rough-hewn and spontaneous notions of anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism were essentially built in to the experience and hence the culture of lowly and super-exploited seamen, and that this experience and culture informed and conditioned in ways both direct and highly developed the alternative life put into practice aboard pirate ships, which, aside from the urge to romanticize, were actually involved with a striking degree of unanimity and solidarity in unmediated, violent class warfare and anti-capitalist alternative-building to a much greater extent than they are popularly thought. Pretty fucking cool!
For the bookworms: Rediker also co-authored (with Peter Linebaugh) something of a new classic in insurrectionary and anarchist historiography, called "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic," a book that i consider a kind of sequel to "Caliban and the Witch" (p.s. the third in an insurrectionary "trilogy" with these two could be said to be manifest in the collection called "Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture" edited by James Koehnline and Ron Sakolsky.) "The Many-Headed Hydra" continues to develop many of the themes present in these earlier Rediker books but specifically regarding mariner involvement in various radical, riotous, and insurrectionary struggles around the Atlantic in the lead-up to the American Revolution, and the period it covers picks up about where Caliban leaves off.
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Informative, but the author was certainly grinding his political axe when he wrote this book. I do see the parallels between pirates and today's labor unions, for sure, but I got the feeling the author is on the side of the pirates...and the unions. I'm sure that was his intenti0n...I just happen to see things pretty much the opposite way and was feeling that tension the whole reading.One would think any intelligent person would feel the way I did in reading it, but maybe the author was writing
Informative, but the author was certainly grinding his political axe when he wrote this book. I do see the parallels between pirates and today's labor unions, for sure, but I got the feeling the author is on the side of the pirates...and the unions. I'm sure that was his intenti0n...I just happen to see things pretty much the opposite way and was feeling that tension the whole reading.One would think any intelligent person would feel the way I did in reading it, but maybe the author was writing from the 1750 point of view, when we didn't know how Socialism was going to turn out yet.
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Great book, provides very useful statistics about the period, and fully covers the dates with a wealth of primary sources. From the pirate angle, Rediker's chapter on seamen and pirates is an almost exact draft for his follow up in "Villains of All Nations." Great book, provides very useful statistics about the period, and fully covers the dates with a wealth of primary sources. From the pirate angle, Rediker's chapter on seamen and pirates is an almost exact draft for his follow up in "Villains of All Nations." ...more
Precedente de "La hidra de la revolución", pero de traducción posterior al castellano. Una lectura apasionante a la vez que un ensayo riguroso Precedente de "La hidra de la revolución", pero de traducción posterior al castellano. Una lectura apasionante a la vez que un ensayo riguroso ...more
In Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, historian Marcus Rediker argues that the "wooden world" of the common 18th century merchant seamen, "Jack Tar," more closely resembled an industrial factory than a workshop (200). As a result, seamen serve as an example of one of the earliest free wage workers whose life was fully subordinated to his labor. The harsh realities of life at sea, explains Rediker, "left little room for belief in the 'dignity of labor'" (295). Although Rediker spends a grea In Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, historian Marcus Rediker argues that the "wooden world" of the common 18th century merchant seamen, "Jack Tar," more closely resembled an industrial factory than a workshop (200). As a result, seamen serve as an example of one of the earliest free wage workers whose life was fully subordinated to his labor. The harsh realities of life at sea, explains Rediker, "left little room for belief in the 'dignity of labor'" (295). Although Rediker spends a great deal of time discussing wage structures and admiralty courts, methods of resistance and mutiny employed by seamen, and the actual labor required on a ship, the book is at its most rich when he moves to a discussion of what Jack Tar did "for [himself]" and his influence on an emerging working-class culture (7). Rediker employs a Marxist framework for his analysis and pulls methods from several disciplines, including history, anthropology, linguistics, and economics. By employing methods from a variety of fields and drawing from a rich collection of primary sources he is able to move away from a strictly "labor history" of the seaman's life to a more nuanced "working class history" (6). Between the man-made and natural dangers that shaped Jack Tar's life, the seaman developed a culture that foreshadowed the collective, anti-authoritarian, and oppositional working class culture in the industrial era. Rediker spends the majority of the book examining life inside Jack Tar's isolated "wooden world." However, the case for seamen as leaders in an emerging, and at least somewhat organized, working class culture depends on their presence in harbors, taverns, and other public spaces where he interacted with his fellow wage-laborers. Future scholars examining the growth of an industrial working class culture ought to explore zones between the "wooden world" and the factory floor (249). Samuel Adams' admiration for Jack Tar's role in the Knowles Riot is a particularly intriguing example of the influence that the seaman's culture had on emerging conceptions of "rights" and "liberty" that would have a major impact on land (252-3). A deeper investigation of just how visible Jack Tar was in 18th century working class struggles, with particular attention to how his peers perceived him, would help explain how an isolated work culture came to serve as a model for resistance on land.
Piracy, in Rediker's view, ought to be viewed as the ultimate form of the common seaman's culture. Using Eric Hobsbawm's definition of "social banditry," Rediker positions pirates as men cooperating to seek revenge against organized capital (269). Pirates, stripped of romance and myth, emerge as collectivist, democratic, and egalitarian sailors consciously opposed to the systems of power and authority they left behind (267). This conception of piracy may swing too far away from both the storybook conception of pirates as sea-bound Robin Hoods and the admiralty courts' view of pirates as criminals. Despite their egalitarian impulses, pirates were extremely violent (271), capable of handing down discipline on par with a merchant captain (265), and apparently absent from the political and cultural exchanges between the land and sea-based working class. As an extreme on the working-class culture continuum, pirates would have been especially threatening to the establishment. That, perhaps more than their egalitarian social system, may have contributed to their appeal as heroes of wage laborers. Scholars should investigate how land-based wage laborers discussed pirates and piracy to add nuance to Rediker's arguments about the pirate's influence on maritime and political culture.
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Predating The Slave Ship by two decades, Between the Devil is a useful source for charting the historiographical themes of Rediker's critique of capitalism in the Atlantic trade with the strong and consistent emphasis on class struggle and power. The basis for many of Rediker's overarching ideas in The Slave Ship are stated plainly here, years before, such as when Rediker stated,
I had to read this for school. I love History, I wanted to be Marcus Rediker when I grew up (when I was in school). *sigh* Back when I was going to do History for a job... Very readable, wasn't torture like so many other required readings. I had to read this for school. I love History, I wanted to be Marcus Rediker when I grew up (when I was in school). *sigh* Back when I was going to do History for a job... Very readable, wasn't torture like so many other required readings. ...more
Marxist claptrap beyond the usual liberal academic extreme. Rediker's Pirates of the Caribbean as a working class prototypical labor union is a caricature almost as amusing and ridiculous as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. Marxist claptrap beyond the usual liberal academic extreme. Rediker's Pirates of the Caribbean as a working class prototypical labor union is a caricature almost as amusing and ridiculous as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. ...more
There's a lot of good information in this, but, man, Rediker's socialism is really showing in this one. Much less readable than Villians of All Nations. There's a lot of good information in this, but, man, Rediker's socialism is really showing in this one. Much less readable than Villians of All Nations. ...more
Very academic, but very cool. Worth looking at, for sure.
A very interesting history of the maritime world of the period. Rediker gives great attention to even the seemingly-mundane details. A fascinating read.
Etude très dense et intelligible,les marins et pirates, proto-anarchistes?
Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad (Tony Buba, director) Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad (Tony Buba, director), about how the Amistad Mutiny of 1839 lives on today in popular memory among the people of Sierra Leone. ...more
The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans out of the South to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West between...
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