ABSTRACT
I take my title from William Blake, the visionary poet and painter who in 1793 wrote America, a Prophecy, an account of the American Revolution and its place in the Atlantic's Age of Revolution. I use the poem to reflect upon some of the themes of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, a study of the development of capitalism in the anglophone North Atlantic, and the challenges from below to this world-transforming process. The book begins with English colonization in the early seventeenth century and ends with industrialization in the early nineteenth, exploring the deployment and discipline of labor on a global scale. Merchants, manufacturers, planters, and royal officials built trade routes, colonies, and a new economy, connecting the four corners of the Atlantic (northwestern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America) by organizing the labor of servants, slaves, sailors, soldiers, urban and rural laborers, and factory workers. In undertaking such grand labors, these classically educated rulers cast themselves as Hercules, the mythical hero of antiquity, and employed the many-headed hydra as a symbol of disorder and resistance, a monstrous obstruction to the building of state, empire, and capitalism. The heads of the rebellious monster were dispossessed commoners, transported felons, religious radicals, insurgent servants and slaves, riotous urban laborers, and mutinous soldiers and sailors. To their horror, the rulers discovered that as they chopped off one head, two new ones grew in its place—such was the motive power of resistance. The heads, originally brought into productive combination by Hercules, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against him—from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution. The setting of the clash was the “Red Atlantic,” a historic space of violence and bloody oppression, but also of resistance, revolution, and emancipation. 1
