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The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. By PETER LINEBAUGH AND MARCUS REDIKER. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Pp. 433. $30.00 (cloth).
This is a stimulating and pioneering work which makes a significant contribution to the study of history from a global perspective. Indeed, Linebaugh and Rediker recreate a forgotten phase of globalization: the emergence of a multiethnic proletarian culture during the early modem period. The scope of the work encompasses the whole of the British Atlantic world between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, and the authors are equally at home discussing the social, economic, and cultural contexts of life in England, on the mainland colonies of North America, on the islands of the Caribbean, and in West Africa, not forgetting life on the wooden world at sea. The authors provide a compelling portrait of the underclass of the first British empire. Whereas the story of the early modem white Atlantic is so often told in terms of heroism, freedom, and opportunity, it is here depicted convincingly by way of its neglected underside of oppression, harshness, and brutality. The Atlantic underclass, the authors remind us, was white as well as black, and most of the early modern subjects of the English crown, of whatever race or ethnicity, shared a common experience as victims of authority and guinea pigs of colonial enterprise. The work ranges from discussions of the economic transformation of early modem England and the outlet found in American colonization for the social dislocation...