Book Review

In the second of his twelve labors, Hercules was assigned the task of killing the poisonous hydra, the nine-headed monster who sprouted two new snake heads each time the mythical hero cut one off. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker show, the classical hero's struggle appealed strongly to the monarchs, strategists, and mercantile entrepreneurs who plotted the expansion of European empires in the early modern period. They saw themselves as Hercules imposing order on an untidy world represented by an international class of people who opposed the expansion of the market around the Atlantic rim: landless wanderers, wage laborers, urban rioters, enslaved Africans, Native Americans, pirates, religious radicals, assorted seekers of human liberation all. In lyrical and overtly partisan prose rich in literary allusion and narrative power, the authors condemn the spread of global capitalism and chart what they consider the heroic—and often doomed—resistance of the hydra against its exploitative machinery. The origins of the modern world, they argue, were shaped by this constant and violent interplay.

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