History Below Deck: An Interview with Marcus Rediker
Rent from DeepDyve- History Below Deck:An Interview with Marcus Rediker
The factory, whether in the Midlands of England making cloth or the Midwest of the U.S. making steel, seems the quintessential institution of the rise of capitalism, and those toiling in it the archetypical worker. Marcus Rediker calls attention to a less visible realm of labor, the sea, telling about those who worked on ships, particularly sailors and pirates, during the age of sail on the Atlantic. Rediker first staked out this history in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987), and expanded it in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, co-authored with Peter Linebaugh (2000). Alongside those, he also collaborated on Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 1 (1990), which shifted the focus from founding fathers in conventional histories to the movements of working people who shaped history.
Rediker's investigation of the age of sail led to his pathbreaking account of the vehicle that made slavery possible, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), which describes the various people who staffed, invested in, and were human cargo on those seagoing "factories of capitalism," as he puts it. Complementing that book, in The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012), he unpacks one of the few successful resistances of those enslaved.
Throughout, Rediker has foregrounded such moments of resistance. His Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (2004) and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (2014) focus especially on pirates, and The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017), shines light on an unlikely eighteenth-century pacifist hero. In addition, Rediker has co-edited two books on the Atlantic during the age of sail, and written a film, Ghosts Of Amistad: In The Footsteps Of The Rebels, with Tony Buba (2014). [End Page 547]
Born in 1951, Rediker attended Vanderbilt University and Virginia Commonwealth University (BA, 1976), doing his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1982). He has taught at Georgetown and the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History.
This interview, conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, took place in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 6 and 12, 2019.
How would you encapsulate the kind of history that you do?
I do "history from below." It focuses on the people who have been left out of the narratives of the past, especially those based on the nation-state. It's not just a matter of having sympathy for their lives but about how ordinary working people have made history and how their collective actions have frequently shaped history.
A lot of the history I write has been hidden. I try to recapture lost voices and get close to the experience of unknown, frequently anonymous people. The great difficulty of doing this kind of history is that the people I study didn't usually create any documents of their own, so this work requires reading many different kinds of documents that were usually produced by the ruling classes and their allies, and reading them against the grain. Sometimes you're reading the archive of repression, but I'm especially interested in the active agency of unknown people in shaping both the archive and history.
Your first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, gives an account of sailors and sets out your project. It's a history of the working class, but it's not about a factory as we usually think of them. One of your points is that we conceive of the sea as an empty space, but the sea was the prime conduit of capitalism as it developed in that era, and sailors were its chief workers. How were you drawn to study sailors instead of other workers?
Actually, when I went to graduate school in 1976, I intended to be a...
