Book Review

Comparative/World

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker analyze episodes of challenge to the emergence of British capitalist domination of the North Atlantic trade in human beings, manufactures, and New World goods. The authors situate their selection of chapter subjects in the observations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British elites in which the dangerous and disorderly laborers of the developing transatlantic economies were cast repeatedly as threatening manifestations of the mythological hydra. Such observations eloquently demonstrate that those who confronted English and Irish proletarians, religious dissenters, and radicals, as well as those who sought to dominate New World and African peoples, understood well that the task of profitably controlling polyglot, multiethnic, multiracial workers on the high seas, and on the lands of three continents, was comparable to that of Hercules facing the many-headed beast.

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The tale of the hydra serves another purpose here, as Hercules did not know in advance that he would succeed in beheading the monster. In retelling various contests of Diggers, Levellers, religious dissenters (Antinomians, Anabaptists), English Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, Linebaugh and Rediker purposefully focus on the resistance of those whom the earliest capitalists would tolerate only as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," arguing explicitly that on the eve of the English revolution of 1640, the Herculean victories of expropriation and exploitation of the commoners and the masterless (defined globally to include the slave trade and New World colonies) were neither inevitable nor fully secured.

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