Outlaws of the Atlantic
Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This maritime history "from below" exposes the history-making power of common sailors, slaves, pirates, and other outlaws at sea in the era of the tall ship.
In Outlaws of the Atlantic, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker turns maritime history upside down. He explores 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. Bringing together their seafaring experiences for the first time, Outlaws of the Atlantic is an unexpected and compelling peoples’ history of the “age of sail.”
With his signature bottom-up approach and insight, Rediker reveals how the “motley”—that is, multiethnic—crews were a driving force behind the American Revolution; that pirates, enslaved Africans, and other outlaws worked together to subvert capitalism; and that, in the era of the tall ship, outlaws challenged authority from below deck.
By bringing these marginal seafaring characters into the limelight, Rediker shows how maritime actors have shaped history that many have long regarded as national and landed. And by casting these rebels by sea as cosmopolitan workers of the world, he reminds us that to understand the rise of capitalism, globalization, and the formation of race and class, we must look to the sea.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a keen eye for interesting characters, historian Rediker (The Amistad Rebellion) delivers a brisk narrative about the "ordinary" men who traversed the Atlantic interlocking networks of empire and early capitalism. Edward Barlow, who went to sea in the mid-1600s at age 13, represents the Englishmen who chose to earn a living aboard ship. Henry Pitman, on the other hand, was forced into his seafaring adventures, having been sentenced to servitude in Barbados in 1685 as punishment for a political crime. He escaped by boat, encountering pirates and indigenous Americans on his journey home. But pirates, disruptive sailors, and unwilling passengers are the real stars. During the early 1700s, pirates threatened the stability of Britain's empire, seizing property and damaging international trade. In the late 18th-century, sailors played a major role in the American Revolution, particularly in raising awareness of the horrors of Royal Navy press gangs. Meanwhile, African slaves regarded ships as locations of resistance, fomenting uprisings as they tried to destroy the lucrative slave trade (the dramatic 1839 Amistad case actually hinged less on slavery than on legal definitions of piracy). As Rediker's nifty book demonstrates, on the high seas there was a fine line between hero and criminal. Illus.
