Marcus Rediker
Biographic Data
| ID | 512549 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus Rediker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus |
| FAMILY NAME | Rediker |
| SIGNATURE | REDIKER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6756-022X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 197 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Co-writing a creative history of abolitionism from below: The theatre play The Return of Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker and Naomi Wallace
Shortly after Rediker published The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist in 2017, Wallace and Rediker embarked on a co-creative journey that would lead to the co-production of the play The Return of Benjamin Lay which premiered in London on 13 June 2023. This interview traces this co-writing journey and process, a creative history from below
Reflections on History from Below
History from below is insurgent history, deriving much of its popularity and power from movements from below. The phrase had its modern origin in the 1930s, when Lucien Febvre, Georges Lefebvre, and A.L. Morton used it to discuss the history of working people in France and England. The term exploded into wider international usage in the 1960s and 1970s as various movements arose to demand new histories. In the US and many other parts of the world…
Escaping Slavery by Sea in Antebellum America: A Labor History
This article explores a relatively neglected topic in the histories of slavery and abolitionism in the antebellum United States: how enslaved people escaped by sea and more specifically how the waterfront was a zone of struggle over slavery from roughly 1820 to 1865. The article treats four main themes: ships, trade, and port cities within the rise of Atlantic capitalism; life and work on the waterfront; efforts to control the docks from above; a…
Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen
Reviewed by: Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen Marcus Rediker Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire By Johan Heinsen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. On the evening of 19 January 1683 a group of sailors and convicts huddled up in quiet, urgent conversation on the dark lower deck of the Havmanden, a vessel owned by the Danish West India and Gu…
A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850
Wielogłowa hydra
Przetłumaczył ŁUKASZ MOLLPrezentujemy pierwsze tłumaczenie na język polski fragmentu głośnej książki Petera Linebaugha i Markusa Redikera The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of Revolutionary Atlantic. Autorzy przedstawiają w niej transkontynentalny i transkulturowy zbiorowy podmiot oporu wobec rodzącego się systemu kapitalistycznego. Przetłumaczony fragment dostarcza przeglądu struktury atlantyckiego proletariatu, zdaje sprawę z kluczowej r…
Afterword: Reflections on the Motley Crew as Port City Proletariat
This essay reflects on the workers in Atlantic and Indian Ocean port cities who made possible the rapidly expanding system of global capitalism between 1650 and 1850. In all of the ports treated in this volume, a mixture of multi-ethnic, male and female, unskilled, often unwaged laborers collectively served as the linchpins that connected local hinterlands (and seas) to bustling waterfronts, tall ships, and finally the world market. Although the …
The Pirate and the Gallows An Atlantic Theater of Terror and Resistance
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade
Pour un populisme du motley crew
Dans cet entretien, Marcus Rediker décrit comment certains combats d'hier (l'anti-esclavagisme) ou d'aujourd'hui (la lutte contre la peine de mort et les biais du système juridique contre les populations afro-américaines) sont parvenus à mobiliser des forces très hétérogènes autour de revendications unificatrices. Il souligne le besoin de pratiquer un certain travail d'agitation, parfois nourri par de sentiments de colère et dynamisé par des slog…
Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail
Rediker turns maritime history upside down, exploring the dramatic world of maritime adventure not from the perspective of admirals, merchants, and nation-states but from the viewpoint of commoners: sailors, slaves, indentured servants, pirates, and other outlaws from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. He reveals how the "motley" (i.e. multiethnic) crews were a driving force behind the American Revolution; that pirates, enslave…
À bord du négrier: Une histoire atlantique de la traite
Pendant les quatre cents ans que dura la traite négrière, du XVe au XIXe siècle, plus de quatorze millions de prisonniers africains réduits en esclavage traversèrent l’Atlantique pour devenir une main-d’œuvre de masse gratuite. Illustre représentant de l’histoire atlantique et spécialiste de la piraterie, Marcus Rediker propose ici de faire le récit de cette effroyable tragédie depuis un poste d’observation inédit et nous entraîne à sa suite à bo…
The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion, 1839
T his essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the upris…
Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction
The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-cente…
Colloquy with Marcus Rediker on The Slave Ship: A Human History
On the last afternoon of the Society of Early Americanists' most recent biennial conference, sixty-plus colleagues gathered to hear an interdisciplinary panel of scholars focusing on historian Marc
The Slave Ship
History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade
This essay explores the role of sharks in the Atlantic slave trade. It draws on the testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and passengers to assess abolitionist claims that sharks followed slave ships across the Atlantic and feasted on human remains thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The essay concludes that the abolitionists were essentially right and that the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of terror utilized b…
The Many-Headed Hydra: L'histoire cachée de l'Atlantique révolutionnaire
Cet article est la traduction de l'Introduction du livre, L'hydre aux mille têtes. L'histoire cachée de l'Atlantique révolutionnaire , à paraître aux Éd. Amsterdam en 2008. Il s'agit de l'exploration historique de la classe multi-ethnique qui forma la main-d'œuvre bon marché ayant permis l'avènement du capitalisme et de l'économie moderne transatlantique, puis mondialisée, à partir du début du XVII e siècle. Une «foule bigarrée» ( motley crowd ) …
The Pirate and the Gallows: An Atlantic Theater of Terror and Resistance
Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World
Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges
Historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.The essays presented here take a variety of approaches. One group examines the material, cultural, and intellectual constructs that info…
Many middle passages: Forced migration and the making of the modern world
This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oce…
Villains of all nations: Atlantic pirates in the golden age
"Villains of All Nations explores the Golden Age of Atlantic piracy and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates. Historian Marcus Rediker focuses on the high-seas drama of 1716-1726, which featured the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger; swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard; and the unnamed, pegleg pirate who was likely Robert Louis Stevenson's model for Long John S…
The Revenge of Crispus Attucks; or, The Atlantic Challenge to American Labor History
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century
This article uses the myth of the many-headed Hydra, commonly employed by members of various ruling classes around the Atlantic to describe the class struggles that surrounded them, to illuminate the history of the working class in the eighteenth century. It concentrates on two groups of workers, wage laborers (especially sailors) and slaves, two zones of the Atlantic, Europe and North America, and four moments in the history of the Atlantic work…
Villains of all nations: Atlantic pirates in the golden age
"Villains of All Nations explores the Golden Age of Atlantic piracy and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates. Historian Marcus Rediker focuses on the high-seas drama of 1716-1726, which featured the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger; swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard; and the unnamed, pegleg pirate who was likely Robert Louis Stevenson's model for Long John S…
The Many-Headed Hydra: L'histoire cachée de l'Atlantique révolutionnaire
Cet article est la traduction de l'Introduction du livre, L'hydre aux mille têtes. L'histoire cachée de l'Atlantique révolutionnaire , à paraître aux Éd. Amsterdam en 2008. Il s'agit de l'exploration historique de la classe multi-ethnique qui forma la main-d'œuvre bon marché ayant permis l'avènement du capitalisme et de l'économie moderne transatlantique, puis mondialisée, à partir du début du XVII e siècle. Une «foule bigarrée» ( motley crowd ) …
Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges
Historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.The essays presented here take a variety of approaches. One group examines the material, cultural, and intellectual constructs that info…
History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade
This essay explores the role of sharks in the Atlantic slave trade. It draws on the testimony of ship captains, officers, sailors, and passengers to assess abolitionist claims that sharks followed slave ships across the Atlantic and feasted on human remains thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The essay concludes that the abolitionists were essentially right and that the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of terror utilized b…
The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism
Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail
Rediker turns maritime history upside down, exploring the dramatic world of maritime adventure not from the perspective of admirals, merchants, and nation-states but from the viewpoint of commoners: sailors, slaves, indentured servants, pirates, and other outlaws from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. He reveals how the "motley" (i.e. multiethnic) crews were a driving force behind the American Revolution; that pirates, enslave…
Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction
The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-cente…
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES some of the structural and cultural dimensions of capital-labour relations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It situates the lives of labouring people within an expansive transatlantic economy and a labour-scarce colonial economy, a combination that created both a heavy dependence upon unfree labour and persistent struggles over the mobility of workers. The article explores the major types of labour in early Am…
Labour History as the History of Multitudes
Marcel van der Linden Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press 2000) LABOUR HISTORIANS STUDY the class to examine its development, composition, conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what exactly do we mean when we use the term working class? Over the past half-century, the answer to this seemingly simple question changed continuously…
Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade
Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Britain's empire was sustained by shipping. These studies are concerned with a range of enterprises, both home and colonial, in which shipping was involved, relating to goods, people, ideas
Patterns of Pillage: A Geography of Caribbean-Based Piracy in Spanish America, 1536-1718
Afterword: Reflections on the Motley Crew as Port City Proletariat
This essay reflects on the workers in Atlantic and Indian Ocean port cities who made possible the rapidly expanding system of global capitalism between 1650 and 1850. In all of the ports treated in this volume, a mixture of multi-ethnic, male and female, unskilled, often unwaged laborers collectively served as the linchpins that connected local hinterlands (and seas) to bustling waterfronts, tall ships, and finally the world market. Although the …
The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion, 1839
T his essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the upris…
The Revenge of Crispus Attucks; or, The Atlantic Challenge to American Labor History
Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739-1748
Journal Article Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748. By Carl E. Swanson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xxx + 299 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87249-720-8.) Get access Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748. By Swanson Carl E.. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xxx + 299 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87249-720-8.) Marcus Rediker Marcus Rediker Georget…
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Under the Banner of King Death: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716 to 1726
Your Lordships will easily conceive my Meaning when you reflect on the Vigorous part I've acted to suppress Pirates: and if those barbarous Wretches can be moved to cut off the Nose & Ears of a Master for but correcting his own Sailors, what inhuman treatment must I expect, should I fall within their power, who have been markt as the principle object of their vengeance, for cutting off their arch Pirate Thatch [Teach, also known as Blackbeard], w…
The History of Sexuality
Short notices
Edith Ennen, The Medieval Town (1979), 287 (North Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, Dfl. 85.00). Translation by Natalie Fryde of Die europäische Stadt des Mittelalters (Gottingen, 1972). J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800 (1979), xii+297 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, £10.50). John T. Evans, Seventeenth‐Century Norwich. Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690 (1980), xii…
Under the Banner of King Death: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716 to 1726
Your Lordships will easily conceive my Meaning when you reflect on the Vigorous part I've acted to suppress Pirates: and if those barbarous Wretches can be moved to cut off the Nose & Ears of a Master for but correcting his own Sailors, what inhuman treatment must I expect, should I fall within their power, who have been markt as the principle object of their vengeance, for cutting off their arch Pirate Thatch [Teach, also known as Blackbeard], w…
An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Getting Out of the Graveyard: Perry Anderson, Edward Thompson and the Arguments of English Marxism
Other| October 01 1982 Getting Out of the Graveyard: Perry Anderson, Edward Thompson and the Arguments of English Marxism Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism. London: New Left Books. 1980. 244 pp. Schocken Books. 1980. $8. Marcus Rediker Marcus Rediker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1982) 1982 (26): 120–131. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1982-26-120 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Shar…
Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America
THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES some of the structural and cultural dimensions of capital-labour relations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It situates the lives of labouring people within an expansive transatlantic economy and a labour-scarce colonial economy, a combination that created both a heavy dependence upon unfree labour and persistent struggles over the mobility of workers. The article explores the major types of labour in early Am…
Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada
Toward a ‘real, profane history’ of early American society∗
James Axtell, The European and The Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981). T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes,’ Myne Owne Ground’: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1980). Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1980). David W. Galenson, …
Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780
The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism
Floating Proletarians
Pirates and the Imperial State
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Journal Article Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. By Marcus Rediker. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xvi + 322 pp. $24.95.) Get access John W. Tyler John W. Tyler Groton School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 3, December 1988, Pages 898–899, https://doi.org/10.2307/…
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
The seaman as man of the world: a tour of the North Atlantic, c. 1740 2. The seaman as collective worker: the labor process at sea 3. The seaman as wage laborer: the search for ready money 4. The seaman as plain dealer: language and culture at sea 5. The seaman as the 'spirit of rebellion': authority, violence, and labor discipline 6. The seaman as pirate: plunder and social banditry at sea Conclusion: the seaman as worker of the world Appendices…
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century
This article uses the myth of the many-headed Hydra, commonly employed by members of various ruling classes around the Atlantic to describe the class struggles that surrounded them, to illuminate the history of the working class in the eighteenth century. It concentrates on two groups of workers, wage laborers (especially sailors) and slaves, two zones of the Atlantic, Europe and North America, and four moments in the history of the Atlantic work…
The Old Guard, the New Guard, and the People at the Gates: New Approaches to the Study of American History in the U.S.S.R
A N international conference on New Approaches to the Study of American in the Soviet Union was held in Moscow on March I9-21, i99i.1 Sponsored by the Institute of General History and the Department of American History of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., the conference gathered about I30 historians: fourteen from the U. S., three from Germany, two from Great Britain, one from Czechoslovakia, the rest from the U.S.S.R.2 The conference feat…
Jack Tar Fights Back
Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739-1748
Journal Article Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748. By Carl E. Swanson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xxx + 299 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87249-720-8.) Get access Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748. By Swanson Carl E.. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xxx + 299 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87249-720-8.) Marcus Rediker Marcus Rediker Georget…
Building the History of Working-Class America
SOME SIXTY YEARS AGO, Charles Beard and Mary Beard speculated in The Rise of American Civilization that "when the full story of self-government in America is written, reviewing the commonplace no less than the spectacular, pages on the cellular growth of local craft unions will be placed besides the records of town meetings; while chapters on the formation of national labor structures will complement the sections on the origin and development of …
History (48 works) · History (42 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (33 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (17 works) · Ancient history (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Art (13 works) · Politics (10 works)