The Many-Headed Hydra

Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

By: Peter Linebaugh

Narrated by: Cornell Womack

Winner of the International Labor History Award

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 17th 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.

©2013 Peter Linebaugh (P)2022 Beacon Press

Critic reviews

"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)

"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 stories - until now - were 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' Mama's Disfunktional!)

Great History, Great Narrator

Absolutely adored this history of the Atlantic proletariat. I'll definitely be looking into more of the authors' books.

Paradigm-shifting

Fans of David Graeber will love this. A testament to the human impulse toward freedom. Naming an undeniable through line across the history of resistance and solidarity..
I found this book grounding and heartening. Popular culture has vilified the symbol of hydra, teaching us to fear it, and to believe that centralized power is the only source of safety.
This book holds up a mirror: oppressors are the ones who fear the hydra. The good news is the hydra is *us*.

extraordinary history I will be listening to over

An outstanding history of proletarian revolutionaries, agitators and "sons and daughters of Liberty" among the hewers of wood and drawers of water, performed flawlessly. One of the best audible downloads I've purchased. if we are meant to "own nothing and be happy" be sure to download this to your hard drive.

the book forgets it's audience

the book forgets its audience and spends as much time beating the reader with the cudgel of "capitalism is bad" as it does explaining the early workers history. The reader is already there because they likely share the authors view, they are also likely interested in the history, however the author chose to repeatedly beat their views in to the history rather than simply share the history.

I am also pretty sure that the narrator is an AI voice as the cadence, and speed of the narrator is inconsistent and seems to place pauses where commas dont exist in the written text.

Great book, terrible performance

The content of this book is great, but the reading is the worst I’ve encountered on audible. It often sounds like listening to a bad text-to-speech and can hardly tell where one sentence ends and the next begins. Waste of a credit.