{"product_id":"the-manyheaded-hydra-sailors-slaves-commoners-and-the-hidden-history-of-the-revolutionary-atlantic-9780807050064","title":"The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors  Slaves  Commoners  and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries  the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged.\"David Montgomery  author of Citizen Worker Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man  a motley crew of sailors  slaves  pirates  laborers  market women  and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.  When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy  a vast  diverse  and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national  ethnic  and racial boundaries  as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships  from England to Virginia  from Africa to Barbados  and from the Americas back to Europe.  Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe  the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a \"hydra\" and brutally suppressed their risings  yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others  hidden from history and recovered here  have much to teach us about our common humanity.  \"A landmark in the development of an Atlantic perspective on early American history. Ranging from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean and North America  it makes us think in new ways about the role of working people in the making of the modern world.\"Eric Foner  author of The Story of American Freedom  \"What would the world look like had the levelers  the diggers  the ranters  the slaves  the castaways  the Maroons  the Gypsies  the Indians  the Amazons  the Anabaptists  the pirates . . . won? Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker show us what could have been by exhuming the revolutionary dreams and rebellious actions of the first modern proletariat  whose storiesuntil nowwere lost at sea. They have recovered a sunken treasure chest of history and historical possibility and spun these lost gems into a swashbuckling narrative full of labor  love  imagination  and startling beauty.\"Robin D. G. Kelley  author of Yo Mamas Disfunktional!  \"The Many-Headed Hydra is about connections others have denied  ignored  or underemployed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  Europe  Africa  and the Americas came together to create a new economy and a new class of working people. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker tell their story with deep sympathy and profound insight. . . . A work of restoration and celebration of a world too long hidden from view.\"Ira Berlin  author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America  \"More than just a vivid illustration of the gains involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here  in incendiary form  are essential elements for a peoples history of our dynamic  transcultural present.\"Paul Gilroy  author of The Black Atlantic  \"This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture  with eloquence and literary flair  the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic.\"Howard Zinn  author of A Peoples History of the United States\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45665857765429,"sku":"ByrdShop_0807050067","price":70.3,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780807050064.jpg?v=1782410763","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-manyheaded-hydra-sailors-slaves-commoners-and-the-hidden-history-of-the-revolutionary-atlantic-9780807050064","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}