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https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/075193-000-A/paris-in-the-belle-epoque/

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From an incredibly varied selection of 19th century postcards, the Paris of the Belle Epoque (1871 - 1914) comes to life. Street-photography captured Parisians from all walks of life and conveyed the optimism and elegance of the period.

Co-funded by the European Union

All rights for reproduction and diffusion reserved - ARTE G.E.I.E. 4, quai du chanoine Winterer CS 20035F - 67080 Strasbourg Cedex - France

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Paris in the Belle Epoque - Watch the full documentary | ARTE

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From an incredibly varied selection of 19th century postcards, the Paris of the Belle Epoque (1871 - 1914) comes to life. Street-photography captured Parisians from all walks of life and conveyed the optimism and elegance of the period. Co-funded by the European Union All rights for reproduction and diffusion reserved - ARTE G.E.I.E.

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Outspoken Socialist firebrand, political activist and labour organiser Eugene Victor Debs passed away on this day, October 20, in 1926..In the waning years of the 20th century Debs emerged as a working class leader, a hero of the railroad workers of the U.S and Canada. Aftr working for the railroad, first as a labourer and then a locomotive fireman, Debs went on to lead the Fireman's union , assist in the organising of other rail unions and ultimatey organise the nations first industrial union - the American Railway Union ( ART). By the turn of the 20th century, Debs emerged as the leader of the Socialist party, and from there went on to assist in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) aka the Wobblies, helping to pioneer a fighting union politics that organized all workers, becomming the beloved figurehead of American radicalism. Debs story is the story of labor battles in industrialising America, of a working class politics grown directly of the Midwestern heartland, and of a distinct American vision of Socialism.

Eugene Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana to parents Jean Daniel and Marguerite Marie Bettrich Debs, who both immigrated to the United States from Colmar, Alsace, France. and operated aa grocery store. He dropped out of High School at the age of 14 to work as a painter. He did several jobs such as boilerman and grocery clerk.

In 1875 he was elected secretary of the Terre Haute lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. His intelligence and commitment, coupled with his conservative outlook (he argued against participation in the nationwide railroad strikes of 1877), attracted the attention of the brotherhood's leaders. By 1881, he was national secretary of the brotherhood, increasingly its spokesman on labor issues, and its most tireless organizer. Simultaneously, Debs entered politics as a Democratic candidate for city clerk in 1879 when only 23. First elected over Republican and Greenback-Labor party candidates, Debs was overwhelmingly reelected in 1881. Four years later, he was elected to the Indiana State Assembly with broad support from the wards of Terre Haute's workers and businessmen. Debs organized the American Railway Union, which waged a strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago in 1894

During the 1880s Debs's ideas began to change. At first a firm proponent of organization of workers by their separate crafts, he resisted the industrial organization implicit in the efforts of the Knights of Labor and ordered his members to report to work during the Knights' 1885 strike against the southwestern railroads. But his year-long involvement (1888-1889) in the strike against the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad altered these views. He now thought craft organization divisive, a hindrance to working people's efforts to secure fair wages and working conditions. And concentrated corporate power, he argued, had a debilitating effect on the political rights and economic opportunity of the majority of Americans. By 1893 he had resigned his position as secretary of the brotherhood and begun organizing an industrial union of railroad workers, the American Railway Union (aru).

The 1894 strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago marked a second turning point in Debs's thinking. Pullman Palace Car Company, was the largest railway car company in the United States at the time, George Pullman the owner had a business plan that was, if nothing else, creative. He built a company town around his factory in Illinois, named it after himself and made it a requirement that the workers live there (and pay rent to their employer, guess who?). Some historians have said of the town of Pullman (now a suburb of Chicago), that it was "a version of the Indian reservation system.

The ARU, even before its first convention, was besieged with reports from Pullman as to the unfairnesses of the company towards its employees including a unilateral; 25% cut in wages in 1893, while all of the world reeled from a great economic depression. This, in spite of a discreet increase in the annual dividend payment Pullman sent to his stockholders.

The workers at Pullman contacted the ARU and Debs paid the town a visit. With Debs in command, the ARU agreed with the suggestion made by Pullman workers, and called for a boycott of all trains in America pulling Pullman cars. It was a risky move but the ARU fell behind its new members from Pullman. Train traffic in and out of Chicago collapsed almost immediately. The press, owned by smaller tycoons, came out in Pullman's side calling Debs a " dictator" and " King Debs". The New York Times called Debs " an enemy of the human race". The cover of the popular magazine, Harper's Weekly had an image of Debs sitting on an idle Chicago railway yard, wearing a crown.

Railroad owners hired security firms to break the strike and violence broke out. US President Grover Cleveland sent in the federal militia, railway cars were set on fire and inevitably, gun fire broke out. The courts helped out in issuing an injunction on this basis:

" ... (that) the interstate transportation of persons and property, as well as the carriage of the mails, is forcibly obstructed, and that a combination and conspiracy exists to subject the control of such transportation to the will of the conspirators."

This led to Debs being arrested with other boycott leaders on July 17, 1894, and jailed. This broke the union as Debs later described:

" Once we were taken from the scene of action, and restrained from sending telegrams or issuing orders or answering questions, then the minions of the corporations would be put to work..

"Our headquarters were temporarily demoralized and abandoned, and we could not answer any messages. The men went back to work, and the ranks were broken, and the strike was broken up, ... not by the army, and not by any other power, but simply and solely by the action of the United States courts in restraining us from discharging our duties as officers and representatives of our employees."

Clarence Darrow signed up as Debs' lawyer and argued the case before the Supreme Court of the United States in March of 1895, to release Debs and his union brethren from their prison cells. The decision went against the union, with Justice David Josiah Brewer writing:

" A most earnest and eloquent appeal was made to us in eulogy of the heroic spirit of those who threw up their employment, and gave up their means of earning a livelihood, not in defence of their own rights, but in sympathy for and to assist others whom they believed to be wronged. We yield to none in our admiration of any act of heroism or self-sacrifice, but we may be permitted to add that it is a lesson which cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly that under this government of and by the people the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and at the ballot-box, and that no wrong, real or fancied, carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob, with its accompanying acts of violence."

The unified power of railroad management working intimately with federal authorities ultimately broke the strike but Debs emerged from this experience as an avowed and committed socialist and dedicated himself to the start-up of a number of institutions now prominent in the American politics and international labor law such as Social Democracy of America, the Social Democratic Party of the United States, the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Debs questioned the ultimate ability of trade unions to combat successfully capital's economic power and, after the 1896 elections, looked upon socialism as the answer to working people's problems.

As an organizer he traveled the nation defending workers in their strikes and industrial disputes. Although many workers enthusiastically applauded Debs's vision, sadly relatively few actually endorsed his political program. n 1

In 1918, just as World War I loomed, Eugene Debs directed his very effective speaking talents at the federal government, speaking out against the war as soon as it began.;

". I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is thee world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades."

One speech, later analyzed by the federal government, resulted in Debs being charged with sedition, he was charged with having:

"... caused and incited and attempted to cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces of the United States".

These words meant he was convicted and even though he was 63, he was given a 10-year prison term (also disenfranchised for life meaning he could never again vote again in America). At his sentencing he told the court:

" Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own."

His conviction was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States who, again, ruled against him and upheld both the conviction and sentence.

Over time, calls went out that Debs be pardoned bringing this remark this from President Woodrow Wilson:

" This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration."

Debs conducted his last campaign for president as prisoner 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and received nearly a million votes, though he had been stripped of his citizenship. In his five campaigns as the Socialist Party candidate for president of the United States, Debs excoriated the economic exploitation of workers, including the then rampant abuses of child labor, with rare oratorical skill. He advocated for unions in all major industries and promoted a vision of socialism as grassroots economic democracy. In a deeply racist, patriarchal society, he was also staunchly anti-racist and pro-women's rights.

Refusing to ask for or accept special treatment, he was confined to his cell for fourteen hours a day and was allotted twenty minutes a day in the prison yard. He wore a rough denim uniform. He ate food barely fit to eat. He grew gaunt and weak. He became an American folk hero, a principled advocate of free speech, and and even as he grew sicker Convict No. 9653 refused to ask for a pardon.

On Christmas Day 1921 he was released without a pardon but with a commuted sentence. He was 66. But Debs never recovered from his time in prison and lived most of of what remained of his life in a sanatorium. He died on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70 in Elmhurst.

He is remembered as an opponent to big corporations and World War One. American socialists, communists, and anarchists honor his compassion for the labor movement and motivation to have the average workingman build socialism without large state involvement. He motivated the left in America and continues to this day. In the legacy of Eugene Debs there is much more than a speech here, a prison term there, and nor did he push the plow of labor rights by himself. But on countless occasions he said what had to be said, urged on his nervous union leaderships to do what was right in spite of the overwhelming force and might of the wealthy in America of his generation. In this, he always put himself on front lines and paid the prices that were collateral to his duties as a social justice crusader: jail, fines, ridicule in the press, but also the heavy personal cost of not just those personal injuries but also of being necessarily loud and alone at the front of a still unawares and very suspicious population as slowly, the American citizen became aware of the importance of unions and of worker rights.

Ten years after his death later his beloved wife, Kate, was buried beside him. Debs was cremated and his ashes were interred in Highland Lawn cemetery, Terre Haute, with only a simple marker. Today, his home in Terre Haute, Indiana has the designation of a National Historic Landmark, and a website http://debsfoundation.org/ dedicated to him Debs citizenship was finally restored in 1976, fifty years after his death and in 1990, the U.S. Department of Labor named Debs a member of its Labor Hall of Honor.

As a socialist, Debs denounced as irrational and unjust a capitalist system that created extravagant wealth for a few at the top, while millions of ordinary working people struggled to get by. Most important, he thought it was possible to build a new, cooperative society, to transcend the irrationality, waste, and greed of the capitalist economic system, and to end wage slavery and all forms of social oppression. He called this socialism.

The life and legacy of Eugene V. Debs stands as a rich and vibrant testament to one man's dedication to a liberated future. Indeed, Debs was an individual for whom solidarity with his fellow humans was in his blood. who used his voice in defense of the common man, his legacy can best summed up in his own words.:

" Yes, I am my brother's keeper," he wrote. "I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe myself."

As a principled left-wing socialist, Debs was cut from a different cloth than most mainstream politicians, then and now. How many career politicians today would be willing to go to prison for their views and ideals. In short Debs is a socialist icon that we so need in our present times.

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Outspoken Socialist firebrand, political activist and labour organiser Eugene Victor Debs passed away on this day, October 20, in 1926..In the waning years of the 20th century Debs emerged as a working class leader, a hero of the railroad workers of the U.S and Canada.

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Incredibly good article interview with Marcus Rediker

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I would like to start by asking you about a main concept of your work, which is the concept of "hydrarchy." As a matter of fact, I think this can be useful to understand the history of capitalism but also its processes of today, as water seems to be once again the space in which the main capitalistic transformations are acting. In saying this, I am thinking about the Mediterranean Sea, but of course not only. This concept of the dominion of/on the sea is also being re-used in different fields and context of analysis and research. Can you explain us this concept of hydrarchy and how it crosses your work?
This concept of hydrarchy emerged from the book Peter Linebaugh and I wrote called The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press 2000). Edward Braithwate wrote in 1631 that sailors lived in a "hydrarchy," the social order of life at sea. Hydrarchy literally meant government on the water. We re-deployed an archaic term and made it central to our book. It has remained important to all of the work I have done ever since. Like many other concepts, hydrarchy needs to be understood from two perspectives: from above and from belove.

If we look at it from above, hydrarchy refers to the imperial organization and control of maritime space during the construction of a global system of capitalism, beginning in the late 16th century and continuing on to the present. The hydrarchy of naval power polices and manages the sea, for the accumulation of capital.

Hydrarchy from below refers to how seafaring people organize themselves and their lives. Historically this self-organization includes a maritime tradition of resistance that is radical, democratic, and egalitarian. Hydrarchy from below is based on the work seafarers do, how they cooperate in a dangerous environment, and how they learn that solidarity is necessary for survival. The egalitarian dimension of hydrarchy also flows from the mobility of the worker, which limits the ability of property to mediate human relationships. A rough equality of condition is built into the concept of hydrarchy, in contrast to landed society where from antiquity forward social life was organized around the transmission of property, usually through patriarchal institutions. A different, more inclusive logic governs social life at sea: "we are all in this boat together." Hydrarchy as a new concept became a way to understand social struggles at sea - to explore the efforts to create discipline and control from above, and the efforts to resist and create new social formations from below. Peter and I studied hydrarchy in the early modern era but its application as a concept is broader. Scholars, artists, and activists working on all periods of his- tory have taken up the term. I am happy to see that it is proving to be useful.

It seems that the Hydrarchy is strictly connected to the rising of capitalism. In her last book Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (PM Press 2021), Silvia Federici talks about the concept of enclosure as a process that never ended. What do you think about this and in which ways the process of enclosure is linked to the relationship between capitalism and the sea?

Silvia's work on this subject is of course very important and I agree that the process of enclosure is central to the rise of capitalism. But the sea has been nearly impossible to enclose. Imperialists debated this matter in the 17th century, Spain and Portugal insisting on mare clausum, the sea enclosed for their own uses, as the Dutch and the English argued for mare liberum, the sea as a common available for all to use freely. Ruling classes on both sides of the debate want- ed to use the seas to establish the power of capital and empire, but no one could actually project enough naval power to create full enclosure. The oceans of the world became a site of struggle,

between nations and classes. To Silvia's critique that Marx neglected race and gender in his analysis of the rise of capitalism I would add that he never thought about the sea as a real, material place of struggle. This is a common bias in our thought, something I have called "terracentrism", the often unconscious belief that only the landed surfaces of the earth are real, and that the sea is an abstract, unreal, ahistorical void. We need to think about the sea as a real place - of work, accumulation, conflict, and history-making. We need to recover and honor the struggle for the oceanic commons.

In your book The Slave Ship: a Human history (Viking-Penguin 2007) you analyze the ship as a sort of engine of this Hydrarchy and you speak about it as a floating factory. In which sense is the ship a factory and what does this factory crossing the sea produce?

Most people do not know that the word "factory" has an African origin. European slave traders grounded ships along the coast of West Africa and used them as places of business for buying human bodies. The root-word of factory is "factor", or merchant, who organizes production and trade. So that is one way in which a ship was literally a factory. The slave ship was also a machine, a floating factory that produced specific things, and we have to look at it in this way in order to understand how it was a site of history-making. I argued in The Slave Ship: A Human History that the ship/factory produced two things.

First, by transporting human bodies from one place to another, from the coast of West Africa to the plantation system of the New World, it produced labor power that would be redeployed in a new setting for the accumulation of capital. The accumulation of labor power happened on the ship, valorized by the workers who were on board.

The second thing the ship produced was categories of race. Let me give two examples. The ship's crew in the 18th century - then and still today - was always multi-ethnic. A ship might begin its voyage from Liverpool with 40 sailors on board - English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, Greek, African, African American. But when they arrived on the coast of West Africa and began trading for enslaved people, the people on that ship would be called the "white people," not because of the color of their skin, but because of their control of the technology, the ship, that made the trade possible. Sailors went from multi-ethnic to "white." They actually lost some of their whiteness on the Atlantic voyage and I can say more about that if you like. Now let's look at it from the African Side. The people who were loaded onto the ships were also multi-ethnic - Fante, Igbo, Mende, and dozens of other ethnicities. But once transported across the Atlantic, they disembarked the ship as members of a single "negro race". What we see is that race formation was going on board of the ship - and of course it continued in the port cities and on plantations, but the ship marked the original racial transformation.

I developed the idea of the ship as a floating factory in the first book I wrote, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge University Press 1987), about merchant ships and sailors in the 18th century. The idea was that workers from many different backgrounds came together on the ship, as waged laborers, to toil cooperatively. The ship captain, armed with extreme and violent authority, oversaw and often forced their cooperation within a complex division of labor. The ship was in all of these ways a precursor of the modern factory.

Labor historians had rarely seen the ship as a factory, nor the sailor as a kind of industrial worker, because work at sea did not produce commodities. But thinking of production as only involving commodities is a mistake: production involves the creation of value through time and space. Sailors created part of the value of the commodity called "slave." When enslaved workers produced the original value of sugar, tobacco, rice, or cotton on the plantation, sailors created additional value by moving those commodities through space to international markets. A related point is that women's domestic labor also produces value, but does not necessarily produce commodities, so reproductive labor fits in the same category. Thinking about the ship as a factory help us to think about the nature of both the factory and the working class.
You said before they lose their whiteness during the crossing. What do you mean by that?
Multi-ethnic sailors became "white" as they loaded enslaved people aboard the vessels. But as they sailed across the Atlantic to Virginia, Jamaica, or Brazil, sailors slowly lost their value to the captain, who needed forty sailors during the "middle passage" but needed only sixteen or so to take the vessel back to Europe. As the vessel approached its port of delivery the captain would bully the seamen in the hope that some of them would desert the ship, allowing him to avoid paying their wages. Sailors lost their whiteness as they became surplus labor of lower value to capital. Poor, abused, often sick, and abandoned, these European sailors were some- times called "white negroes" to signify their lowly status.
Do you think we can talk today about the Black Mediterranean as a sort of a reduced Middle Passage?
One of the themes of The Many Headed Hydra was that the "middle passage" was not merely a descriptive term about one phase of a voyage, but a broader concept linking expropriation in one place (West Africa) to exploitation in another (on the plantations of the Americas). The notion of the "middle passage" would also apply to workers who lost their land in Ireland and ended up in London or New York, illustrating what Marx called the "primitive accumulation of capital." People expropriated in one setting moved (or were moved) to another setting and attached to the capitalist mode of production in a new way, in a new place, in a new class relationship. The same concept would apply to the Mediterranean and its peoples over its vast history.
Coming back to the ship as a factory, in your work about the slave ship, you underline how the ship produces not only labor power and the categories of race, but it also produces counter-knowledges and resistance. And in your research, you found that people on board on those spaces started to call each other "shipmate." Can you tell us more about this and how do you think this concept is linked to the ships crossing today the Black Mediterranean?
It would take more knowledge than I have to say exactly how the concept applies to the Black Mediterranean, but I would suggest that the starting point for analysis should be the language and understandings of the mobile people who cross the water. What do people on the migrant vessels call each other? During the era of the slave trade the term "shipmate" was used in every major European maritime language, in Portuguese ( malungo), Dutch ( sibbi or sippi), and French ( bâtiment). This in turn was related to the formation of what anthropologists call "fictive kinship," social ties invented for the sake of solidarity and support. Enslaved Africans did this and so did sailors, who called each other Brother Tar (i). People who found themselves aboard a ship, in unusual circumstances, were forced to innovate, to relate to people in new ways, communicating, singing, dancing, crying, and grieving. Shoreside cultural practices had to be modified at sea. I would expect something like this to take place on migrant ships, where people cooperated with unusual intensity in order to survive. Part of our work it is to listen and record the linguistic and social creativities embodied in the new kinship that can be formed at sea.
By continuing with the counter-practices of resistance and the new subjectivities created by the ship, why it is important today to talk about the slave trade and how it is important to put it as a focus on the political discourse?
It is essential to talk about the slave trade now, because we still live its heavy history and consequences every minute of the day. This is especially true in the former slave societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, but it is also true for Europe, which benefit- ted massively from the slave trade and the global institution of slavery. The slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness. Their legacy in the present is discrimination, deep poverty, structural inequality, and premature death. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd we now have a movement demanding a reckoning with this history. Now is an important time to talk about this part of the past.

I want to underline that it is crucial to talk about the oppression, but we must also talk about the resistance. Africans on slave ships never passively accepted their fate: they fought back, even under extreme circumstances. They were not simply victims, but heroes: they struggled, they died, and they helped to create the movements to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself.

I think this is really important to underline today, because for the dominant narration these practices of resistance and fighting just never happened. And we can see this device also today as regards migrants crossing the Mediterranean: they are dehumanized and deprived of their stories, social profiles, bodies, and reduced into numbers without voice, subjectivity, agency. In the film Ghost of Amistad ( ii) you made with Tony Buba - which is made starting from your book The Amistad Rebellion ( Viking- Penguin 2012) - you went to Sierra Leone to research who were those people on board of that particular ship, who were they, what kind of social profiles they had, where were they from. There is a moment in the film in which you say, "in that moment I felt that the ghost of the race and slavery and colonialism was literally hovering just above our heads." Can you tell us about this film and about this concept you use many times in your work about ghosts?

Let me answer this question by discussing anther concept, the "violence of abstraction." For many years the study of the slave trade was primarily statistical - how many ships, how many people, how many died, and so on - all important things to know. But this approach "sanitized" the slave trade, made it emotionally easier to discuss, but it also tended to hide the real, living, suffering, dying human beings on board the slave ship. The statistical means of analysis had its origins in the ledgers and letterbooks of merchants, who used numbers to hide the de-humanization and the moral consequences of what they were doing. In studying the Amistad case, my guiding questions were simple: who were these people who rose up and captured a slave vessel in 1839 and sailed it to freedom? Where did they come from? What were their lives before they were enslaved? What kind of knowledge and experience did they bring with them from West Africa that allowed them to wage this successful uprising aboard the ship? I sought to overcome the violence of abstraction.

One of the reasons why we made the film is that we wanted to make history real in a visual and personal way, by talking to people about the memory of the Amistad uprising within the oral traditions of Sierra Leone, where all of the rebels had originated. What we found in making the film was that the history of the slave trade has a long afterlife: the lasting legacy of slavery is what the film is all about. That moment you mentioned, when we felt the presence of the "ghost of race and slavery and colonialism", we were in the village of Folu, talking about an ancestor who had been enslaved and ended up on the Amistad but finally returned home. We found a woman elder who was his direct descendant. This was an extraordinary moment for us. Then another villager said, "we are worried that you are gathering this information to prosecute us," for their kinsman had helped to kill the captain of the Amistad during the revolt. When I first heard this, I did not understand what the man was saying; you can literally see in the film the incomprehension on my face. Suddenly, I realized that the combined histories of race, slavery, and imperialism still created fear, based on an event that had happened 175 years ago! This was the lingering ghostly presence of the slave trade. That film is the record of our effort to understand concretely, in human terms, what the slave trade meant to people in Africa. We wanted to make the history real and to humanize the subjects of history.

We can say that in this sense Ghosts of Amistad is a good example of "history from below", the research method you work with as a Marxist scholar. How does this method work and in which way it can help us to have access to the histories hidden, cancelled, removed, silenced by the dominant archives?

History from below is difficult to practice because it requires understanding the past from the point of view of people who did not usually leave documents on their own. One must learn to read archival documents against the grain, to learn through them things that people with power, who usually created the documents, did not intend for us to learn. All of my books are histories from below, in one way or another. I read various historical documents and I place them within the force field of struggle, rooted in various kinds of oppression and resistance. I try to understand what those waging the struggle were doing and especially why they were doing it, what they were hoping to gain. In this sense history from below is actually very old; it is not a new methodology. It entails a kind of sympathy for people and their struggles. I try to establish bonds of solidarity with these historical actors; it matters not that they are dead. I try to develop an ethical relationship with them in order to tell their stories in ways that would have made sense to them and at the same time honor what they did. This is something we normally do not talk about: the secret ethical life of books and films. Ghosts of Amistad tries to demonstrate the methods of history from below in action.
Notes.
i. Tar is a slang term for a sailor, in use since at least 1676. The etymology of the word is probably derived from tarpaulins (cloth), in reference to wide-brimmed hats made of tar-soaked cloth used by early sailors, later shortened to tars.

ii. M. Rediker, T. Buba, Ghosts of Amistad. In the footsteps of the rebels, https://www.ghostsofamistad.com/.

This interview was originally published in Italian in the left magazine Machina.

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Hydrarchy, Maritime Resistance, and the Production of Race: An Interview with Marcus Rediker

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It is essential to talk about the slave trade now, because we still live its heavy history and consequences every minute of the day. This is especially true in the former slave societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, but it is also true for Europe, which benefit- ted massively from the slave trade and the global institution of slavery.

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Aesthetic Transgression, arts as rebellion

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Aesthetic Transgression, arts as rebellion

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https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/73/2/115/5980764

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It is almost axiomatic that breaking rules is an important engine of creativity and innovation in the modern artworld. To describe the beginnings of great art movements by pointing to transformative moments where the rules were fruitfully broken is a commonplace.

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Involving slavery Reference cases involving slavery All cases Cases with short summaries Cases with full summaries

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Three men feast on free lunch in a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson
In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, beer-swilling Homer falls in love with a sandwich. He spends his days nibbling away at the "sickening, festering remains of a 10-foot hoagie," Nathan Rabin writes, "long after decency, self-respect, and survival would all seem to dictate throwing it out." The sandwich may be yet another instance of the show pulling some obscure detail from American history for comic effect - or maybe writer David M. Stern read Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in which the playwright describes "an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese."

O'Neill's sandwich is so historical, it has a name, the Raines Sandwich, named after New York State Senator John Raines, the author of an 1896 law that raised the cost of liquor licenses substantially, upped the drinking age from sixteen to eighteen, and banned alcoholic beverages on Sundays except in large hotels and lodging houses which served a complimentary meal with their drinks. The law targeted working people and their one day of respite, and it hit bar owners hard. "After all," writes the Irish Examiner, "labourers mostly worked six days a week, with Sunday their only full day for drinking, and Sunday was the most profitable day for saloons."

The complimentary-meal-with-drinks mandate, as it were, was designed so that wealthy patrons at luxury hotels could drink on Sundays, but low-rent saloon owners seized on the loophole, transforming dive bars into rooming houses overnight with tablecloths and "alleged bedrooms" made from attics and basements. "It was then that the loosest possible definition of a 'substantial meal' became the Raines Sandwich." The sandwich might be made of anything, even a brick between two slices of bread; it was rarely eaten. Sometimes, it would be served to a guest with their beer or whiskey, then whisked away and given to someone else. A single Raines Sandwich might last the day, or even the whole week.

Some establishments tried to get away with serving crackers and moldy cheese alone (stalwart New York Irish pub McSorley's gave away crackers, cheese, and onions - a dish for which they now charge). But the courts required a sandwich, at the very least to be served, and the city enforced the law with righteous vigor - thanks in large part to a young Theodore Roosevelt. As Darrell Hartman writes at Atlas Obscura, New York Republicans in Albany "spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural small-town churchgoers" worried about urban vice. But Raines had a city ally in Roosevelt, then a "37-year-old firebrand... pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city's newly organized police commission."

Roosevelt canvassed the Lower East Side with patrolman Frank Rathgeber, sending him into saloons in plain clothes to investigate. "Rathgeber said he saw many sandwiches but only one bed," writes author Richard Zacks in Island of Vice. The sandwiches were moldy, and were taken away uneaten. "He never was asked to buy a second sandwich" with subsequent drinks, "or even to eat the first one." Despite the reform crackdowns, the shady business of the Raines Sandwich let saloon owners skirt the law until it was repealed, finally, in 1924. As Hartman notes, behind the purported good intentions of the Temperance movement lay a determined culture war:

Those in favor of the Sunday ban, generally middle-class and Protestant, saw it as a cornerstone of social improvement. For those against, including the city's tide of German and Irish immigrants, it was an act of repression-an especially spiteful one because it limited how the average laborer could enjoy himself on his one day off. The Sunday ban was not popular, to say the least, among the city's Jews, who'd already observed their Sabbath the day before.

The Raines Law was as much about enforcing religious observance and cultural conformity on immigrants as it was an attempt to combat crime, poverty, and violence in the city. Those whose beliefs did not prevent them from enjoying themselves on Sunday saw no reason to take the law any more seriously than they would a rotting week-old sandwich or a brick between two slices of moldy bread.

via Atlas Obscura
Related Content: Explore Thousands of Free Vintage Cocktail Recipes Online (1705-1951) The First Known Photograph of People Sharing a Beer (1843) The Science of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promises to Enhance Your Appreciation of the Timeless Beverage is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at

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How New Yorkers Dodged Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws by Inventing the World's Worst Sandwich

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Three men feast on free lunch in a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, beer-swilling Homer falls in love with a sandwich. He spends his days nibbling away at the "sickening, festering remains of a 10-foot hoagie," Nathan Rabin writes, "long after decency, self-respect, and survival would all seem to dictate throwing it out."

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American Revolution as a defense of slavery?

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American Revolution as a defense of slavery?

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University of South Carolina historian Woody Holton is mounting a campaign in support of the New York Times 1619 Project's central claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution waged to defend the institution of slavery.

Holton began this effort on July 4, American Independence Day, in a Washington Post commentary in which he claimed that the American Revolution would have been averted had not Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation granting freedom to slaves who would flee masters already in rebellion. Holton further argued that the Declaration of Independence has been misunderstood. In Holton's view, it was not a revolutionary manifesto, but a secessionist legal brief.

On September 1, Holton announced that every day on his Twitter account he would post one additional "piece of evidence" proving that the Declaration of Independence was a racist reaction against what he calls "the Anglo-Black Alliance." He intends to do so for 76 consecutive days, in a cynical reference to 1776, the year that American independence was declared. Holton assures his Twitter followers that he has many other "pieces of evidence" to support this claim.

Holton encourages skeptics to consult the works of likeminded historians, including the Stalinist Gerald Horne, whose error-filled and plagiarized book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, is a major influence. Holton's embrace of Horne should be taken as a warning that he is prepared to use Horne's method: the blatant distortion and falsification of archival material. In a careful and detailed review of Horne's book posted on the World Socialist Web Site, Fred Schleger concluded:

Horne's scholarship does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Horne's work is worse than inaccurate: it is, in large measure, a work of fiction. His interpretation of source material is so inaccurate as to be fanciful: quotes are truncated to invert their meaning, sources are misattributed, and even elementary facts are misrepresented-or are just plain wrong. ... What makes Horne's misrepresentations so galling is not just their magnitude and number, but that they are central to his project of rewriting American history.

Holton agrees, and fawningly so, with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the media celebrity who is credited with inspiring the 1619 Project, in her insistence that "anti-black racism" is "endemic," residing in "the very DNA of this country." In attempting to substantiate this racialist, anti-historical and fundamentally right-wing prognosis, Holton is perfectly willing, as we will see, to abuse the historical record, reverse earlier positions he himself has taken, and to engage in provocative and debased attacks on scholarly criticism.

Holton has a new book due to be released in October, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, in which he promises to carry forward his effort to discredit the American Revolution as a reactionary event. This will precede by one month the release by the New York Times of a new book, with the appropriately religious-sounding title, 1619: A New Origin Story. Another 1619 Project book will be released at the same time, this one directed at small children.

Holton's column in the Washington Post

In his Post column, Holton says that he believes that the American Revolution was caused when "Whites" became "furious" after learning "that Blacks had forged an informal alliance with the British." It was only this uncontrollable racist fury that caused "Whites" to formally declare independence. According to Holton, the American Revolution was no revolution at all, but a "secessionist" reaction to the threat of slave liberation posed by the British Empire, and, in this, its true essence, was nothing so much as a dress rehearsal for the Confederate counterrevolution of 1861. On Twitter, Holton has even equated the Dunmore Proclamation with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

To support his claim that the creation of the United States was a pro-slavery counterrevolution, Holton points to the 1772 Somerset decision, in which Lord Mansfield, judge on the Court of the King's Bench, ruled that slavery could not exist in England proper because it was not established by positive law. Holton says that this ruling caused great anxiety in the 13 colonies, even though it had no juridical application there. But he concedes that a scholar who studied the decision's impact could only find "references to Somerset in six Southern newspapers." Holton does not admit it, but Somerset was most fiercely opposed in the British Indies and Jamaica, which never wavered from the Empire during the American crisis. In any case, six "references" is infinitesimally small relative to the literally hundreds of thousands of pages of newspaper print and pamphlets that protested the Stamp, Tea and Declaratory acts, all of which Holton dismisses as nothing more than "resistance to parliamentary innovations."

Holton is thus forced to base his argument on the Dunmore Proclamation, issued in November of 1775 by the last royal governor of Virginia (John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore) offering freedom to slaves who took up arms against masters already in revolt against the crown.

According to Holton, the imperial crisis that had grown from the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, erupting into insurrection with the commencement of the Revolutionary War itself in the spring of 1775, was a storm that would have blown over had it not been for Lord Dunmore. Once Dunmore issued his proclamation in November of 1775, a racist tide surged forward among white Americans in favor of "secession." Every other bit of evidence that Holton musters in his column is contingent on Lord Dunmore, perhaps history's most implausible revolutionary.

As Holton puts it,

Until 1775, most White Americans had resisted parliamentary innovations like the Stamp Act and the tea tax but had shown little interest in independence. Yet when they heard that Blacks had forged an informal alliance with the British, Whites were furious. ... Whites' fury at the British for casting their lot with enslaved people drove many to the fateful step of endorsing independence...

To arrive at this conclusion, Holton must disregard the basic chronology of the Revolution. In fact, the war was already on a half year before Dunmore's order. Major battles had already taken place in New England, the Continental Army had been formed, and a situation of dual power had emerged throughout the colonies, with the imperial state crumbling and new revolutionary structures of authority taking its place, at the head of which was the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In Virginia, British authority had rapidly dissolved over the preceding two years. In fact, Holton fails to note that Dunmore issued his order from his refuge aboard a British naval vessel in the James River! Robert Middlekauff captured the scene in his noted volume on the American Revolution, The Glorious Cause:

There he sat while the Convention, the old House of Burgesses under a new name, took over the task of governing ... By November, Dunmore was feeling frustration as he sat on a swaying deck and contemplated British power, which like himself was very much at sea. [1]

Historians of the American Revolution rebuke Holton

On September 6, six historians of the American Revolution-Carol Berkin, Richard D. Brown, Jane E. Calvert, Joseph J. Ellis, Jack N. Rakove, Gordon S. Wood- published an open letter that, in the space of a few paragraphs, dismantled the key claims Holton made in his Washington Post column. These historians are leading scholars who have published many dozens of highly regarded books and articles, and count numerous prestigious awards among them, including three Pulitzer Prizes.

The historians focus on the dubiousness of what Holton calls an "alliance" between blacks and the British Empire. In fact, only 300 out of an estimated 300,000 slaves in Virginia actually saw action in Dunmore's "Ethiopian Regiment," that is, 1 in 1,000. The historians remind Holton, who seems to have forgotten the basic sequence of events, that "[b]y November 1775 Virginia, like most of the other colonies, had already radically moved toward virtual independence from British authority." They note that "Dunmore issued his proclamation motivated by military desperation, not abolitionist ideals. In 1774, the colonists had already become effectively independent of British authority."

The war had already begun by April 1775, they explain, in the battles of Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress followed this by appointing George Washington to command and authorizing an invasion of Canada. They write that already in August 1775, the king "declared the colonists in open rebellion." They conclude that "Dunmore's Proclamation three months later launched nothing; rather it sought to crush a movement already well underway." As for the Somerset decision, they point out that "None of Virginia's leaders cited Somerset in a diary or correspondence-not Washington, not Jefferson, nor any of the others."

The historians underline that the American Revolution invigorated antislavery sentiment, writing that "the first society with antislavery aims in modern history originated in Revolutionary Philadelphia in 1775" and that "during the war some northern states became the first slave-holding political entities in world history to abolish slavery by law."

The criticism is presented in the most patient and collegial terms. The historians write that they share the concerns that slavery be studied as central to American history and that they "believe in social justice, but not at the expense of historical truth."

Holton doubles down on Lord Dunmore

Holton published a censorious and defensive reply within two days. [2] He did not challenge any of the specific points the historians raised. Instead, he expressed irritation ("It saddens me...") that the historians had responded to his "700 word" essay in the Post -it was actually twice that long-preferring that they had waited for his forthcoming "700 page book."

Holton feints a retreat from the monocausal explanation of the Revolution he had presented in the Post. Pretending to be aggrieved by misinterpretation, Holton now claims that he did not lay so much stress on the Dunmore Proclamation as his critics say:

All I argued in the essay that the professors criticize is that one of these factors that turned these white restorationists into advocates for independence was the mother country's cooperation with their slaves. It was not the reason, but it was a reason [emphasis in original].

In point of fact, Holton's Post column does not mention a single other "factor" besides white racist fears over British emancipation. [3] He simply brushes aside everything that came before the Dunmore Proclamation, writing that "most White Americans ... had shown little interest in independence," but "when they heard that Blacks had forged an informal alliance with the British, Whites were furious." Their inner racism unloosed by Dunmore, angry "Whites" decided for "secession."

Holton only pretends to be misunderstood. He hides his actual meaning in convoluted prose in his response to the historians. Yet it is still there. Holton continues to insist that the only real factor in the revolution was "the Anglo-Black alliance" ratified by Dunmore. He writes:

The professors claim that white colonists were already headed toward independence in fall 1774, when these African American initiatives began. But in this they indulge in counterfactual history-assuming they know what would have happened. It seems clear to me that, even that late, had Parliament chosen to repeal all of its colonial legislation since 1762, it could have kept its American empire intact. What we are looking for are the bells that could not be unrung. Especially in the south [sic], one of the British aggressions that foreclosed the possibility of reconciliation was the governors' and naval officers' decision to cooperate with the colonists' slaves.

In other words, Holton's critics do not "know what would have happened." Only he, Woody Holton, "knows what would have happened." And that is ... nothing, without Lord Dunmore! Everything that came before the Dunmore Proclamation, including the blood spilled from the war's first several thousand casualties, the King's declaration of war on the colonial rebellion, the installation of Washington at the head of the Continental Army, etc., all of these "are the bells that could ... be unrung." The Dunmore Proclamation was the only "bell" that mattered. Until then, the Parliament "could have kept its American empire intact." Only the Dunmore Proclamation, because of the white racist rage it induced, "foreclosed the possibility of reconciliation."

Holton does not even appear to realize he is contradicting himself. On the one hand he implies that the Dunmore Proclamation was a catastrophic error that cost the British much of their North American empire. At the same time, he presents it as a revolutionary masterstroke. Perhaps his forthcoming "700 page book" will square this circle.

Holton's method will be familiar to those who have followed the 1619 Project controversy and the operations of Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein. To a popular audience, the readership of the Washington Post, Holton makes the most hysterical case possible: White racist fury was the sole cause of the Revolution! Then, when challenged by noted scholars in the field, he assumes the role of the misunderstood victim and deviously retreats from his actual position. And in still another venue, on social media, he and his followers launch vicious ad hominem attacks, accusing these same scholars of "giving BJs to hagiographers of the Founding Fathers"-Holton's own crude words-and personally attacking them.

The method is the man. Holton and his supporters are not engaging in a genuine academic debate. This is "history" contrived by an individual who has broken with the most basic scholarly standards of his field.

Holton vs. Holton

Holton has also broken with himself. His new monocausal theory of the American Revolution, which makes the Dunmore Proclamation the singular event that caused the war, is flatly contradicted by a position he presented in his Bancroft Award-winning biography of Abigail Adams, wife of the Founding Father John Adams:

If there was a single moment when the American Revolution became inevitable, it was the day the British ministry headed by Frederick, Lord North, determined its response to the Boston Tea Party. Only about fifty men had participated in the destruction of the tea (although hundreds of Boston radicals cheered from the docks). Yet North decided that the punishment for this outrage must be collective. Over a nine-week period in the spring of 1774, Parliament passed four measures that spread alarm not only in Boston, not just throughout Massachusetts, but all over British North America [emphasis added]. [4]

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

In his biography of Abigail Adams, Holton states that the war "became inevitable" with the reaction of Parliament in the summer of 1774 to an event, the Boston Tea Party, that had taken place in December of 1773. These events took place many months before the Dunmore Proclamation. Before them a major crisis had already emerged, which he also discusses in great detail in this book, and after them the war actually erupted. Holton's 483-page volume on Abigail Adams does not include even a single reference to the Dunmore Proclamation!

In his study of Abigail Adams, Holton strives to achieve the vantage point on the Revolution of an extremely articulate and political woman. The book does not suggest anything other than that she was part of a revolutionary generation, one of whose most prominent figures was her husband. Holton's biography demonstrates that he now is arguing for what he knows to be a false case.

Holton's myth of an "Anglo-Black Alliance"

When pressed, again in collegial fashion, by historian Raymond Lavertue on Twitter over what "Anglo-Black Alliance" means, concretely, Holton erupted in a foul tirade. But he did not answer Lavertue's question.

As near as can be gleaned from the evidence he has presented thus far, Holton deduces the existence of such an "alliance" from the fact that some Virginia slaves ran to British lines in 1774 and 1775. The alliance was then solidified by the Dunmore Proclamation, he says. In his Post column, Holton writes,

Starting in November 1774-five months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord-Blacks in the Virginia Piedmont gathered to assess how to use the impending conflict between colonists and crown to gain their own freedom. Over the next 12 months, African Americans all over the South made essentially this pitch to beleaguered royal officials: You are outnumbered, you need us-and we will fight for you if you will free us. At first the British refused, but eventually Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, began quietly welcoming African Americans to what he called his "Ethiopian Regiment."

A reader who knew nothing of the events in 1774 in Virginia-a year treated in detail in a new book by Mary Beth Norton [5]-might be forgiven for assuming that an independent congress of slaves appointed representatives who then made diplomatic overtures to imperial officials in a series of high-level negotiations. Of course, no such formal gatherings would have been possible under the system of chattel slavery, a central feature of which was the denial of the right to self-organization.

Holton has stretched the definition of "alliance" well past its breaking point. What he is actually talking about is the movement of slaves as individuals and small groups, typically families, plantation by plantation, to British positions of control as the war developed. This is an important and fascinating subject. Slaves became aware of the conflict among the white masters and sought to exploit it. Some seized on the possibilities to press for their freedom before Dunmore's proclamation. But the grandiose term "alliance" has a formal meaning in the history of war that cannot be sustained by the evidence. And Holton has yet to explain how it is possible that an "alliance" that began after the war started could also have been the war's cause.

Not only logic, but basic facts undermine Holton's claims about the formation of a race-based alliance system being the cause of war.

"Whites" were not unified among themselves on either the Revolution or on the question of slavery. Anti-slavery sentiment was certainly not a part of the calculations of Loyalists, who may have made up 20 percent of the white colonial population. On the contrary, those Loyalists who were slaveowners had their human property protected by the Empire. After their defeat in the revolution, many fled, slaves in tow, to the British Caribbean. The most notable evacuee was Dunmore himself, who assumed governorship of the slave-rich colony of Barbados. Indeed, the most staunchly Loyalist part of the British North American empire was that part with the greatest number of slaves: the Caribbean.

The idea that black Americans were unified behind the Empire in an "Anglo-Black" alliance is just as preposterous. It is well known-or at least it was at one time-that the first Patriot casualty of the American Revolution, in the Boston Massacre of 1770, was a free black, Crispus Attucks. The recently deceased historian of the American Revolution, Gary Nash, estimated that 9,000 blacks served the Patriot cause. [6] Perhaps a similar number served under British arms. But claims that 100,000 ran to British lines, and that 20,000 served the Crown, statistics that circulate widely on the internet, do not appear to be based in fact. The Australian historian Cassandra Pybus, who has done the most thorough study of the data, suggests that no more than 20,000 slaves made their way to British lines in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas during the entire course of the fighting. Two other authoritative estimates, by noted historians Allan Kulikoff and Ira Berlin, also drastically reduce the 100,000 figure. [7]

But if 100,000 slaves indeed ran to British lines, or even half that number did so, then what became of them? Holton says the British "kept their promise." But he also acknowledges that only a few thousand liberated American slaves made it to Nova Scotia-where, as Canadian historian James W. St.G. Walker has demonstrated, British promises of land and lots were never fulfilled. [8] Still smaller numbers went to Britain and Sierra Leone. If the numbers are correct, this would mean, by definition, that the British did not "keep their promises" to many thousands, most of whom either died of disease, were returned to slavery, or, as Ira Berlin suggested, preserved their freedom after running away within the new United States.

Terrible conditions at British camps, exacerbated by a smallpox epidemic, claimed the lives of most runaways. Of the 1,500 slaves who sought refuge with Dunmore in the initial stages of the war, two-thirds died of disease. The deaths to disease-typhoid, variola and especially smallpox-continued to decimate the former slaves under British control right on up to the surrender at Yorktown. Pybus describes the scene there in October 1781:

In the final terrible days before Cornwallis' capitulation, most of the black recruits who could walk-men, women, and children-were sent out of the garrison, with what little rations could be found, to fend for themselves. When the victorious Americans entered Yorktown, they found it littered with people dying from wounds and smallpox. [9]

Nor did Dunmore's Proclamation of freedom extend to a large category of slaves who were labeled as "sequestered." These slaves, who numbered in the thousands, were usually captured by the British on abandoned Patriot plantations. They were impressed as slaves into service to the British military, or else they were given to Loyalist slaveowners as compensation for slaves lost to the Patriots-in clear violation of Holton's fanciful "alliance." Finally, it must be noted that there were also slaves who gained freedom through service in the Patriot cause-Virginia passed such a law of emancipation in 1783. [10]

Holton has been strangely silent on another British proclamation that came after Dunmore's that menaced free blacks with slavery. Put in effect by British General Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779, "the Philipsburg Proclamation," as it is remembered, reiterated the offer of freedom to slaves of masters in rebellion. But that was not its main purpose. It began with a complaint against the Patriot forces for having "adopted a practice of enrolling NEGROES among their Troops." And it announced that the British army would seize "all NEGROES taken in arms, or upon any military Duty" and sell them into slavery, "the money to be paid to the Captors." [11]

The fundamental point is this: The question of slavery became an issue only in the midst of the revolutionary crisis and after fighting had already erupted. Only then did it emerge in all its different aspects, with blacks, slave and free, fighting for both sides. It was an epiphenomenon of the revolution. Try as he might, Holton cannot escape this fact.

Once again, on the American Revolution and slavery

The flight of slaves to British lines, and the few thousand who ultimately gained freedom in this way, was one aspect of the challenge that the American Revolution delivered to slavery. But infinitely more important to the ultimate demise of slavery, "four score and seven years" later in the American Civil War, was the movement toward abolition that slavery induced in the North, and more briefly in the South.

Unlike the Civil War, the Second American Revolution, the move against slavery in the Revolution and the early republic was not an intended consequence of the revolution. But neither was it incidental. As Gordon Wood, Eric Foner, David Brion Davis, and others have explained, the American Revolution, in adopting the rhetoric of freedom and slavery as a metaphor for the colonial relationship with Britain, drew attention to chattel slavery and made it conspicuous in a way it had not before been. Another eminent historian, the late Bernard Bailyn, explained that though slavery was not destroyed in the Revolution,

... it had been subject to severe pressure as result of the extension of revolutionary ideas, and bore the marks ever after. As long as the institution of slavery lasted, the burden of proof would lie with its advocates to show why the statement "all men are created equal" did not mean precisely what it said: all men, "white or black." [12]

Another group of scholars, including Alfred Young, Ray Raphael and Gary Nash, have demonstrated that the revolution cut deep and wide in American society, infusing with political thinking even its oppressed layers, including women, poor farmers, indentured servants and other propertyless whites, free blacks and the slaves themselves. This body of scholarship has shown that blacks-both slave and free, North and South-seized on the ideas and opportunities presented by the Revolution to advance the cause of freedom.

It was in this historical context that the first concentrated move against slavery took place. In Virginia and Maryland a manumission movement among American masters increased the number of free blacks more than sixfold between 1790 and 1810. Even in South Carolina, the number of free blacks tripled, from 1,800 to 4,500. [13] The northern states immediately after the revolution set about putting in place laws that abolished slavery gradually over the coming decades. Vermont, the first state to enter the union after 1776, also became the first governing authority in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery by law. The very first abolitionist society in the world emerged in Philadelphia in 1775. Perhaps Jefferson had these developments in mind when he optimistically wrote, in 1782, that he detected

a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way, I hope, preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation; and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation. [14]

As historian Kate Masur shows in her new book on the first civil rights movement, presently the most authoritative volume on the subject, the "revolutionary era's abolitionist movement sought not only the end of race-based slavery but also the recognition of the newly freed." Accordingly, anti-slavery organizations fought for anti-racist laws and provided legal defense for free blacks targeted by racist lawmaking in the early republic. Anti-slavery and anti-racism, on one side, and slavery and racism, were completely bound up. [15]

More fundamentally, the rapid capitalist development in the North hinged on the emergence of what came to be called "free labor," a category that, in the thinking of the time, subsumed wage labor, productive capitalist enterprise, and small farmers and businessmen. Not only slavery, but indentured servitude and other forms of personal dependency, including the ancient guild system, gave way. But in the South, the enormous expansion of the plantation system after the deployment of the cotton gin in the late 1790s caused a staggering expansion of slavery, a development that was integral to the larger global capitalist growth paced by British industrialization.

Out of these complex and contradictory historical processes there emerged the first mass abolitionist political movement in world history in the 1820s and 1830s, followed in the 1850s by the anti-slavery Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, and then in the 1860s the Civil War-in which some 700,000 Americans fought and died, and which, with the freeing of the slaves, effected the largest seizure of private property in world history prior to Russia's 1917 October Revolution.

The Declaration of Independence

Holton tries to reduce the Declaration of Independence, certainly among the most important revolutionary manifestos in world history, to little more than a public announcement of a counterrevolutionary plot. He dismisses the Declaration's preamble, containing arguably the most famous lines in the history of American letters, in which Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Jefferson further detailed, in soaring language, the inherent and natural right to revolution, and explained that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" required that the "Facts be submitted to a candid world."

Holton doesn't see much to any of this. "[T]he Declaration briefly mentions human rights but focuses on states' (nations') rights, specifically the right of entities like the 13 colonies to break away from their mother countries," he opines. "[M]ost Whites who quoted it went straight to its secessionist clauses."

Among these "secessionist clauses," Holton finds only one to be of any interest-but it was one that did not make the final Declaration. This was Jefferson's condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade, which was cut, Jefferson later explained, owing to opposition from South Carolina and Georgia slave interests, as well as New England slave traders. Holton does not see this deleted passage as evidence of Jefferson's anti-slavery beliefs at the time. But Jefferson's clause spoke powerfully against slavery in its condemnation of the British crown, which, he wrote,

[H]as waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

Holton attaches immense significance to the fact that this clause was "three times longer" than any other Jefferson wrote. But Holton cynically disregards the first portion, with its condemnation of both slavery and the slave trade, as these undermine his thesis. Because he wishes to twist an anti-slavery clause into a pro-slavery and racist justification for "secession," Holton considers only the last sentence, in which Jefferson wrote,

And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The Times' Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

To be blunt, this tendentious and highly selective use of evidence is not dignified for a professional historian, and it must call into question the validity of all the evidence Holton claims to have found in support of his claim that the American Revolution was a racist counterrevolution. How many of the rest of the "pieces of evidence" that he is dribbling out on Twitter are so highly edited and torn from their context as his treatment of this single passage from the Declaration of Independence?

The American Revolution, like all the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the era, could only raise in ideological form the question of equality. It was capable of posing the question, but not resolving it. The power of historian Gordon Wood's writing on the epoch lies in his recognition of the paradox, indeed the essential tragedy, of the inability of the Founding Fathers to bring into the world the republican society that they imagined. Nonetheless, they had entered into a struggle that, in spite of their illusions, was of monumental importance. As the great contradictions of the revolution matured, most notably slavery, they became factors in the revolution's furtherance, coming to a head in the American Civil War.

Holton's British Empire as revolutionary force

Holton's thesis that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution-a position shared by the 1619 Project and Horne-backs him into an impossible corner when it comes to world history. If the American Revolution was launched preemptively to defend slavery against threats of British emancipation-in other words, if the American Revolution was in essence the same as southern secession at the time of the Civil War-it necessarily follows that the British Empire, in "alliance" with "Blacks" against "American Whites," was the progressive contestant in the struggle. The argument of Holton, Horne, and the 1619 Project is that the cause of historical progress rested with King George III, and that it would have been better had the United States not been formed.

This disregards not only subsequent American history-most notably the powerful connections of the American Revolution to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery-but also world history. Holton has always had a narrow national approach. He was even capable of writing in a 2016 book review, "Almost inevitably, placing the War for Independence in a global context diminishes it." [16] His hopelessly provincial view turns inside out, but does not overthrow, national-patriotic narratives. It is in fact not possible to understand the American Revolution outside of placing it in its global context.

The American Revolution's connection to the French Revolution was clear and known in its time. Jefferson, then ambassador to France, personally attended the opening of the French Estates-General at Versailles, in May 1789. The following month he joined with Lafayette in drafting a statement of rights that served as the basis for the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. Then, in July, after the storming of the Bastille, French revolutionaries gathered clandestinely to discuss a new government at Jefferson's residence at the Hôtel de Langeac. Many French soldiers and officers absorbed the ideals of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in the American Revolution, Lafayette most notable among them, and French intellectuals followed the American events with rapture. In recognition of the American contribution to the French Revolution, in 1790 Lafayette gave the key to the Bastille to the new American president, George Washington.

The revolution in France soon triggered a revolution in its richest and most important colony, Saint-Domingue, or Haiti, that had the twofold character of a democratic revolution and a massive slave uprising. Haiti was 90 percent slave and also had a substantial share of free blacks who helped spearhead the revolution. Hundreds of these free blacks had served in " gens de couleur " regiments alongside the French against the British in the American Revolution. Though the Haitian Revolution terrified American slaveholders-and a large number of Haitian slave masters relocated to the US after it, especially in Louisiana-the connection between the American and Haitian revolution is undeniable. As indeed were the connections among all the revolutions that took place in the Atlantic world between 1776 and the failed European revolutions of 1848. [17]

The British Empire, on the other hand, was the cockpit of global reaction throughout the late 18th and the entire 19th century. It fought to suppress the American, French and Haitian revolutions, as well as every democratic, revolutionary and anti-colonial stirring that followed in Ireland, Europe, India, Africa, the Arab countries and China. Within England itself, the British ruling class was willing to unleash brutal suppression to block even elemental demands, such as the right to vote for working class men, as was the case in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. During the American Civil War, the British government under Lord Palmerston inclined strongly to the Confederate cause. London's drift toward diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy, which would have been an act tantamount to war, was blocked chiefly by the British working class, which, in spite of the immense suffering of the "cotton famine," identified overwhelmingly with the cause of freedom after Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is entirely understandable that some slaves sought support from Britain. But the empire's very limited encouragement of slave flight in the Revolution was an example of calculated realpolitik, entirely in keeping with its methods of divide and conquer that would go on to devastating effect all over the world for the next two centuries, from Ulster to Kenya to Mumbai to Guangdong. The crimes of British imperialism, which are far too long to list, cannot be an apology for American slavery. But neither can the objective nature of what the British Empire represented on a global scale be disregarded in any assessment of the political character of the American Revolution.

As for slavery, the British-dominated trade in human chattel continued to its Indies and American possessions, with some 1.5 million men women and children taken from Africa in the years of the imperial crisis and the early American Republic, roughly 1760-1805. The British Parliament ended slavery in the Indies only in 1833. This was done very differently than in the bloody revolution of the American Civil War. It was achieved by handing 40 million pounds off to the masters, many of whom rarely if ever set foot in the Indies. This was the largest bailout in British history until Labour PM Gordon Brown's great transfer of wealth to the City of London banking industry in 2009.

The racialist "theory" of history

Holton's assumption of an "Anglo-Black Alliance" emerges from a larger problem. He believes he has divined the motives of the actors in the American Revolution by sorting them into "White" and "Black" races. In his Post column and his Twitter "pieces of evidence," Holton deduces all the action of the imperial crisis and the war from these two categories. Thus he can write the following phrases: " Blacks had forged an alliance"; "Whites were furious"; "Dunmore's emancipation proclamation enraged Whites." He does not qualify any of this by differentiating, for example, between Patriot and Loyalist slaveholders, between Pennsylvania Quakers or South Carolina frontiersmen, or between free blacks in Boston and chattel slaves in South Carolina.

Racialism rides roughshod over history. What is left out of Holton's account is staggering. There is no English Civil War, no Enlightenment, no concept of the struggle against feudalism and aristocracy. There is no reference to decisive economic factors, such as the abundance of land and scarcity of labor in North America. There is no acknowledgement of mercantilist capitalism, let alone reference to the financial crisis it was undergoing, a crucial aspect of the larger imperial crisis. [18]

And what theory of causation does the racialist approach to history offer? It bestows on race an overriding significance, but where does race itself come from? Holton, following Hannah-Jones, appears to posit a new form of what was once called "American exceptionalism." The "races" are peculiarly American, and of real significance are only the "White" and "Black" races, not the Indians, and not the scores of immigrant groups that have also suffered oppression in America, from the colonial era to the present.

The belief that history is determined by race has long been associated, quite correctly, with the right wing. This was the historical philosophy of the Ku Klux Klan in the US and the Nazis in Germany. But contrary to the fascists' deranged mythology, race did not emerge from nature. It grew historically with capitalism as a means of justifying and making "natural" various forms of exploitation.

This "reification of race" took on increasingly concrete intellectual form in the early 19th century, in the ruling class intellectual retreat from Enlightenment rationalism. In Europe and the United States, the promotion of race as a means of imposing a false interpretation on social reality was inextricably bound up with-indeed was an antidote against- the emergence of the working class and socialism. As Georg Lukacs observed, "the obfuscating and disordering of the social sciences in the imperialist age proceeded largely along the lines of racial theory (race replacing class)." [19]

Holton does not think he is a racist. No doubt he believes he is fighting racism, and that in this fight it is permissible to play fast and loose with the facts of history-even its very chronology-all the better to achieve "a usable past" for the present.

He is mistaken. The oppressed masses of all races and all nationalities require an honest and objective understanding of the past, just as much as they do the present.

The imposition of racialist mythology on history, whatever its short-term and, frankly, pecuniary aims, will only provide fodder for the unscientific and irrationalist miasma out of which the far right emerges. The attack on the American Revolution and Civil War, and the broader historic struggle for equality in which these revolutions formed twin peaks, only strengthens the right wing. It comes at a dangerous moment, when democracy in the United States, and elsewhere, is in a state of peril. Indeed, the far right finds its own "usable past" in the historical territory abandoned, and now denounced, by American liberalism. The attack on the American Revolution by the New York Times and historians like Woody Holton allows Trump and the Republican Party to posture as defenders of 1776. Behind this screen the coup-plotting against democracy deepens.

[1] Middlekauff, Robert and University of Oxford. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985: 322.

[2] Holton, Woody. "The Specter of Emancipation and the Road to Revolution: A Rejoinder to Richard Brown et. al. | History News Network." Accessed September 13, 2021. https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/181195.

[3] Holton, Woody. "Perspective | The Declaration of Independence's Debt to Black America," July 2, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/02/fourth-july-african-americans-declaration/.

[4] Holton, Woody. Abigail Adams: A Life. Atria Books. Kindle Edition: 56-57

[5] Norton, Mary Beth. 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, 2021.

[6] Nash, Gary B. "The African Americans' Revolution," in Gray, Edward G, and Jane Kamensky. The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, 2015: 254.

[7] Pybus, Cassandra. "Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution." The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2005): 258; Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in N.A. Harvard U.P., 1998: 263, 303; Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 2002: 418.

[8] Walker, James W. St.G. Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870. S.l.: Univ of Toronto Press, 2017.

[9] Pybus, Cassandra, "Jefferson's Faulty Math": 257.

[10] Frey, Silvia, "Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution," Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 387-88; and Quarles, Benjamin, "Lord Dunmore as Liberator," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 15, no. 4.

[11] "Philipsburg Proclamation." In Wikipedia, July 17, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philipsburg_Proclamation&oldid=1034059392.

[12] Bailyn, Bernard. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Belknap Press, 2021: 246.

[13] Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

[14] "Extract from Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on the State of Virginia,' 1782 [Quote] | Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters." Accessed September 13, 2021. https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/2218.

[15] Masur, Kate. Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, 2021: 9.

[16] Holton, Woody. "The World is not Enough." Reviews in American History 43, no. 1 (2015): 33.

[17] James, Cyril Lionel Robert. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Secker and Warburg, 1938.

[18] Sheridan, Richard B. "The British Credit Crisis of 1772 and The American Colonies." The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 2 (1960): 161-86.

[19] Lukacs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason, 1952. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Historian Woody Holton launches 1619 Project-inspired attack on the American Revolution

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University of South Carolina historian Woody Holton is mounting a campaign in support of the New York Times 1619 Project's central claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution waged to defend the institution of slavery.

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Amilcar Cabral, a noted Afro-Caribbean political theorist

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Amilcar Cabral, a noted Afro-Caribbean political theorist

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Public Domain Image, Courtesy Casa Comum (05221.000.030)
In 1966 Amilcar Cabral was the Secretary-General and President of the War Council of the P.A.I. G. C. (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde). In January 1966 he delivered an address to the first Tricontinental Conference of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America sponsored by Fidel Castro and held in Havana. His address appears below.
If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also-and even more important-a New Man, fully conscious of his national, continental and international rights and duties. In every field of activity the Cuban people have made major progress during the last seven years, particularly in 1965, Year of Agriculture.

We believe that this constitutes a particular lesson for the national liberation movements, especially for those who want their national revolution to be a true revolution. Some people have not failed to note that a certain number of Cubans, albeit an insignificant minority, have not shared the joys and hopes of the celebrations for the seventh anniversary because they are against the Revolution. It is possible that others will not be present at the celebrations of the eighth anniversary, but we would like to state that we consider the 'open door' policy for enemies of the Revolution to be a lesson in courage, determination, humanity and confidence in the people, another political and moral victory over the enemy; and to those who are worried, in a spirit of friendship, about the dangers which may be involved in this exodus, we guarantee that we, the peoples of the countries of Africa, still completely dominated by Portuguese colonialism, are prepared to send to Cuba as many men and women as may be needed to compensate for the departure of those who for reasons of class or of inability to adapt have interest or attitudes which are incompatible with the interests of the Cuban people. Taking once again the formerly hard and tragic path f our ancestors (mainly from Guinea and Angola) who were taken to Cuba as slaves, we would come now as free men, as willing workers and Cuban patriots, to fulfill a productive function in this new, just and multi-racial society, and to help and defend with our own lives the victories of the Cuban people. Thus we would strengthen both all the bonds of history, blood and culture which unite our peoples with the Cuban people, and the spontaneous giving of oneself, the deep joy and infectious rhythm which make the construction of socialism in Cuba a new phenomenon for the world, a unique and for many unaccustomed event.

We are not going to use this platform to rail against imperialism. An African saying very common in our country says:

'When your house is burning, it's no use beating the tom-toms.' On a Tricontinental level, this means that we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will go on doing until all foreign domination of our African homelands has been totally eliminated.

Our agenda includes subjects whose meaning and importance are beyond question and which show a fundamental preoccupation with struggle. We note, however, that one form of struggle which we consider to be fundamental has not been explicitly mentioned in this programme, although we are certain that it was present in the minds of those who drew up the programme. We refer here to the struggle against our own weaknesses. Obviously other cases differ from that of Guinea; but our experience has shown that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves-no matter what difficulties the enemy may create-is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples. This battle is the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social, cultural (and therefore historical) reality of each of our countries. We are convinced that any national or social revolution which is not based on knowledge of this fundamental reality runs grave risk of being condemned to failure.

When the African peoples say in their simple language that 'no matter how hot the water from your well, it will not cook your rice', they express with singular simplicity a fundamental principle, not only of physics, but also of political science. We know that the development of a phenomenon in movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political level our own reality-however fine and attractive the reality of others may be-can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices. It is useful to recall in this Tricontinental gathering, so rich in experience and example, that however great the similarity between our various cases and however identical our enemies, national liberation and social revolution are not exportable commodities; they are, and increasingly so every day, the outcome of local and national elaboration, more or less influenced by external factors (be they favourable or unfavourable) but essentially determined and formed by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by the overcoming or correct solution of the internal contradictions between the various categories characterising this reality. The success of the Cuban revolution, taking place only 90 miles from the greatest imperialist and anti-socialist power of all time, seems to us, in its content and it way of evolution, to be a practical and conclusive illustration of the validity of this principle.

However we must recognise that we ourselves and the other liberation movements in general (referring here above all to the African experience) have not managed to pay sufficient attention to this important problem of our common struggle.

The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements-which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform-constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all. We believe, however, that a sufficient number of different experiences has already been accumulated to enable us to define a general line of thought and action with the aim of eliminating this deficiency. A full discussion of this subject could be useful, and would enable this conference to make a valuable contribution towards strengthening the present and future actions of the national liberation movements. This would be a concrete way of helping these movements, and in our opinion no less important than political support of financial assistance for arms and such like.

It is with the intention of making a contribution, however modest, to this debate that we present here our opinion of the foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to the social structure. This opinion is the result of our own experiences of the struggle and of a critical appreciation of the experiences of others. To those who see in it a theoretical character, we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.

Those who affirm-in our case correctly-that the motive force of history is the class struggle would certainly agree to a revision of this affirmation to make it more precise and give it an even wider field of application if they had a better knowledge of the essential characteristics of certain colonised peoples, that is to say peoples dominated by imperialism. In fact in the general evolution of humanity and of each of the peoples of which is is composed, classes appear neither as a generalised and simultaneous phenomenon throughout the totality of these groups, nor as a finished, perfect, uniform and spontaneous whole. The definition of classes within one or several human groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of the productive forces and of the characteristics of the distribution of the wealth produced by the group or usurped from others. That is to say that the socio-economic phenomenon 'class' is created and develops as a function of at least two essential and interdependent variables-the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership of means of production. This development takes place slowly, gradually and unevenly, by quantitative and generally imperceptible variations in the fundamental components; once a certain degree of accumulation is reached, this process then leads to a qualitative jump, characterised by the appearance of classes and of conflict between them.

Factors external to the socio-economic whole can influence, more or less significantly, the process of development of classes, accelerating it, slowing it down and even causing regressions. When, for whatever reason, the influence of these factors ceases the process reassumes its independence and its rhythm is then determined not only by the specific internal characteristics of the whole, but also by the resultant of the effect produced in it by the temporary action of the external factors. On a strictly internal level the rhythm of the process may vary, but it remains continuous and progressive. Sudden progress is only possible as a function of violent alternations-mutations-in the level of productive forces or in the pattern of ownership. These violent transformations carried out within the process of development of classes, as a result of mutations in the level of productive forces or in the pattern of ownership, are generally called, in economic and political language, revolutions.

Clearly, however, the possibilities of this process are noticeably influenced by external factors, and particularly by the interaction of human groups. This interaction is considerably increased by the development of means of transport and communication which has created the modern world, eliminating the isolation of human groups within one area, of areas within one continent, and between continents. This development, characteristic of a long historical period which began with the invention of the first means of transport, was already more evident at the time of the Punic voyages and in the Greek colonisation, and was accentuated by maritime discoveries, the invention of the steam engine and the discovery of electricity. And in our own times, with the progressive domesticization of atomic energy it is possible to promise, if not to take men to the stars, at least to humanise the universe.

This leads us to pose the following question: does history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of class, and consequently of class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be to place outside history the whole period of life of human groups from the discovery of hunting, and later of nomadic and sedentary agriculture, to the organisation of herds and the private appropriation of land. It would also be to consider-and this we refuse to accept-that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to consider that the peoples of our countries, such as the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola and the Macondes of Mozambique, are still living today-if we abstract the slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected- outside history, or that they have no history.

Our refusal, based as it is on concrete knowledge of the socioeconomic reality of our countries and on the analysis of the process of development of the phenomenon 'class', as we have seen earlier, leads us to conclude that if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period. This means that before the class struggle-and necessarily after it, since in this world there is no before without an after-one of several factors was and will be the motive force of history. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production-the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership-characteristic of that group. Furthermore, as we have seen, classes themselves, class struggle and their subsequent definition, are the result of the development of the productive forces in conjunction with the pattern of ownership of the means of production. It therefore seems correct to conclude that the level of productive forces, the essential determining element in the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history.

If we accept this conclusion, then the doubts in our minds are cleared away. Because if on the one hand we can see that the existence of history before the class struggle is guaranteed, and thus avoid for some human groups in our countries-and perhaps in our continent-the sad position of being peoples without any history, then on the other hand we can see that history has continuity, even after the disappearance of class struggle or of classes themselves. And as it was not we who postulated-on a scientific basis-the fact of the disappearance of classes as a historical inevitability, we can feel satisfied at having reached this conclusion which, to a certain extent, re-establishes coherence and at the same time gives to those peoples who, like the people of Cuba, are building socialism, the agreeable certainty that they will not cease to have a history when they complete the process of elimination of the phenomenon of 'class' and class struggle within their socio-economic whole. Eternity is not of this world, but man will outlive classes and will continue to produce and make history, since he can never free himself from the burden of his needs, both of mind and of body, which are the basis of the development of the forces of production.

The foregoing, and the reality of our times, allow us to state that the history of one human group or of humanity goes through at least three stages. The first is characterised by a low level of productive forces-of man's domination over nature; the mode of production is of a rudimentary character, private appropriation of the means of production does not yet exist, there are no classes, nor, consequently, is there any class struggle. In the second stage, the increased level of productive forces leads to private appropriation of the means of production, progressively complicates the mode of production, provokes conflicts of interests within the socio-economic whole in movement, and makes possible the appearance of the phenomenon 'class' and hence of class struggle, the social expression of the contradiction in the economic field between the mode of production and private appropriation of the means of production. In the third stage, once a certain level of productive forces is reached, the elimination of private appropriation of the means of production is made possible, and is carried out, together with the elimination of the phenomenon 'class', and hence of class struggle; new and hitherto unknown forces in the historical process of the socio-economic whole are then unleashed.

In politico-economic language, the first stage would correspond to the communal agricultural and cattle-raising society, in which the social structure is horizontal, without any state; the third to socialist or communist societies, in which the economy is mainly, if not exclusively, industrial (since agriculture itself becomes a form of industry) and in which the state tends to progressively disappear, or actually disappears, and where the social structure returns to horizontality, at a higher level of productive forces, social relations and appreciation of human values.

At the level of humanity or of part of humanity (human groups within one area, of one or several continents) these three stages (or two of them) can be simultaneous, as is shown as much by the present as by the past. This is a result of the uneven development of human societies, whether caused by internal reasons or by one or more external factors exerting an accelerating or slowing-down influence on their evolution. On the other hand, in the historical process of a given socio-economic whole each of the above- mentioned stages contains, once a certain level of transformation is reached, the seeds of the following stage.

We should also note that in the present phase of the life of humanity, and for a given socio-economic whole, the time sequence of the three characteristic stages is not indispensable. Whatever its level of productive forces and present social structure, a society can pass rapidly through the defined stages appropriate to the concrete local realities (both historical and human) and reach a higher stage of existence. This progress depends on the concrete possibilities of developments of the society's productive forces and is governed mainly by the nature of the political power ruling the society, that is to say, by the type of state or, if one likes, by the character of the dominant class or classes within the society.

A more detailed analysis would show that the possibility of such a jump in the historical process arises mainly, in the economic field, from the power of the means available to man at the time for dominating nature, and, in the political field, from the new event which has radically changed the face of the world and the development of history, the creation of socialist states.

Thus we see that our peoples have their own history regardless of the stage of their economic development. When they were subjected to imperialist domination, the historical process of each of our peoples (or of the human groups of which they are composed) was subjected to the violent action of an external factor. This action-the impact of imperialism on our societies-could not fail to influence the process of development of the productive forces in our countries and the social structures of our countries, as well as the content and form of our national liberation struggles.

But we also see that in the historical context of the development of these struggles, our peoples have the concrete possibility of going from their present situation of exploitation and underdevelopment to a new stage of their historical process which can lead them to a higher form of economic, social and cultural existence.

The political statement drawn up by the international preparatory committee of this conference, for which we reaffirm our complete support, placed imperialism, by clear and succinct analysis, in its economic context and historical co-ordinates. We will not repeat here what has already been said in the assembly. We will simply state that imperialism can be defined as a worldwide expression of the search for profits and the ever-increasing accumulation of surplus value by monopoly financial capital, centred in two parts of the world; first in Europe, and then in North America. And if we wish to place the fact of imperialism within the general trajectory of the evolution of the transcendental factor which has changed the face of the world, namely capital and the process of its accumulation, we can say that imperialism is partly transplanted from the seas to dry land, partly reorganised, consolidated and adapted to the aim of exploiting the natural and human resources or our peoples. But if we can calmly analyse the imperialist phenomenon, we will not shock anybody by admitting that imperialism-and everything goes to prove that it is in fact the last phase in the evolution of capitalism-has been a historical necessity, a consequence of the impetus given by the productive forces and of the transformations of the means of production in the general context of humanity, considered as one movement, that is to say a necessity like those today of the national liberation of peoples, the destruction of capital and the advent of socialism.

The important thing for our peoples is to know whether imperialism, in its role as capital in action, has fulfilled in our countries its historical mission: the acceleration of the process of development of the productive forces and their transformation in the sense of increasing complexity in the means of production; increasing the differentiation between the classes with the development of the bourgeoisie, and intensifying the class struggle; and appreciably increasing the level of economic, social and cultural life of the peoples. It is also worth examining the influences and effects of imperialist action on the social structures and historical processes of our peoples.

We will not condemn nor justify imperialism here; we will simply state that as much on the economic level as on the social and cultural level, imperialist capital has not remotely fulfilled the historical mission carried out by capital in the countries of accumulation. This means that if, on the one hand, imperialist capital has had, in the great majority of the dominated countries, the simple function of multiplying surplus value, it can be seen on the other hand that the historical capacity of capital (as indestructible accelerator of the process of development of productive forces) depends strictly on its freedom, that is to say on the degree of independence with which it is utilized. We must however recognise that in certain cases imperialist capital or moribund capitalism has had sufficient self-interest, strength and time to increase the level of productive forces (as well as building towns) and to allow a minority of the local population to attain a higher and even privileged standard of living, thus contributing to a process which some would call dialectical, by widening the contradictions within the societies in question. In other, even rarer cases, there has existed the possibility of accumulation of capital, creating the conditions for the development of a local bourgeoisie.

On the question of the effects of imperialist domination on the social structure -and historical process of our peoples, we should first of all examine the general forms of imperialist domination. There are at least two forms: the first is direct domination, by means of a political power made up of people foreign to the dominated people (armed forces, police, administrative agents and settlers); this is generally called classical colonialism or colonialism. The second form is indirect domination, by a political power made up mainly or completely of native agents; this is called neo-colonialism.

In the first case, the social structure of the dominated people, whatever its stage of development, can suffer the following consequences: (a) total destruction, generally accompanied by immediate or gradual elimination of the native population and, consequently, by the substitution of a population from outside; (b) partial destruction, generally accompanied by a greater or lesser influx of population from outside; (c) apparent conservation, conditioned by confining the native society to zones or reserves generally offering no possibilities of living, accompanied by massive implantation of population from outside.

The two latter cases are those which we must consider in the framework of the problematic national liberation, and they are extensively present in Africa. One can say that in either case the influence of imperialism on the historical process of the dominated people produces paralysis, stagnation and even in some cases regression in this process. However this paralysis is not complete. In one section or another of the socio-economic whole in question, noticeable transformations can be expected, caused by the permanent action of some internal (local) factors or by the action of new factors introduced by the colonial domination, such as the introduction of money and the development of urban centres. Among these transformations we should particularly note, in certain cases, the progressive loss of prestige of the ruling native classes or sectors, the forced or voluntary exodus of part of the peasant population to the urban centres, with the consequent development of new social strata; salaried workers, clerks, employees in commerce and the liberal professions, and an instable stratum of unemployed. In the countryside there develops, with very varied intensity and always linked to the urban milieu, a stratum made up of small landowners. In the case of neo-colonialism, whether the majority of the colonised population is of native or foreign origin, the imperialist action takes the form of creating a local bourgeoisie or pseudo-bourgeoisie, controlled by the ruling class of the dominating country.

The transformations in the social structure are not so marked in the lower strata, above all in the countryside, which retains the characteristics of the colonial phase; but the creation of a native pseudo-bourgeoisie which generally develops out of a petty bourgeoisie of bureaucrats and accentuates the differentiation between the social strata and intermediaries in the commercial system (compradores), by strengthening the economic activity of local elements, opens up new perspectives in the social dynamic, mainly by the development of an urban working class, the introduction of private agricultural property and the progressive appearance of an agricultural proletariat. These more or less noticeable transformations of the social structure, produced by a significant increase in the level of productive forces, have a direct influence on the historical process of the socio-economic whole in question. While in classical colonialism this process is paralysed, neo-colonialist domination, by allowing the social dynamic to awaken (conflicts of interest between native social strata or class struggles), creates the illusion that the historical process is returning to its normal evolution. This illusion will be reinforced by the existence of a political power (national state) composed of native elements. In reality it is scarcely even an illusion, since the submission of the local 'ruling' class to the ruling class of the dominating country limits or prevents the development of the national productive forces. But in the concrete conditions of the present-day world economy this dependence is fatal and thus the local pseudo-bourgeoisie, however strongly nationalist it may be, cannot effectively fulfill its historical function; it cannot freely direct the development of the productive forces; in brief it cannot be a national bourgeoisie. For as we have seen, the productive forces are the motive force of history, and total freedom of the process of their development is an indispensable condition for their proper functioning.

We therefore see that both in colonialism and in neocolonialism the essential characteristic of imperialist domination remains the same: the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces. This observation, which identifies the essence of the two apparent forms of imperialist domination, seems to us to be of major importance for the thought and action of liberation movements, both in the course of struggle and after the winning of independence.

On the basis of this, we can state that national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socio-economic whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected.

We have seen that violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the dominated socio-economic whole constitutes the principal and permanent characteristic of imperialist domination, whatever its form. We have also seen that this freedom alone can guarantee the normal development of the historical process of a people. We can therefore conclude that national liberation exists only when the national productive forces have been completely freed from every kind of foreign domination.

It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces.

For this reason, in our opinion, any national liberation movement which does not take into consideration this basis and this objective may certainly struggle against imperialism, but will surely not be struggling for national liberation.

This means that, bearing in mind the essential characteristics of the present world economy, as well as experiences already gained in the field of anti-imperialist struggle, the principal aspect of national liberation struggle is the struggle against neo-colonialism. Furthermore, if we accept that national liberation demands a profound mutation in the process of development of the productive forces, we see that this phenomenon of national liberation necessarily corresponds to a revolution. The important thing is to be conscious of the objective and subjective conditions in which this revolution can be made and to know the type or types of struggle most appropriate for its realisation.

We are not going to repeat here that these conditions are favourable in the present phase of the history of humanity; it is sufficient to recall that unfavourable conditions also exist, just as much on the international level as on the internal level of each nation struggling for liberation.

On the international level, it seems to us that the following factors, at least, are unfavourable to national liberation movements: the neo-colonial situation of a great number of states which, having won political independence, are now tending to join up with others already in that situation; the progress made by neo-capitalism, particularly in Europe, where imperialism is adopting preferential investments, encouraging the development of a privileged proletariat and thus lowering the revolutionary level of the working classes; the open or concealed neo-colonial position of some European states which, like Portugal, still have colonies; the so-called policy of 'aid for undeveloped countries' adopted by imperialism with the aim of creating or reinforcing native pseudo-bourgeoisies which are necessarily dependent on the international bourgeoisie, and thus obstructing the path of revolution; the claustrophobia and revolutionary timidity which have led some recently independent states whose internal economic and political conditions are favourable to revolution to accept compromises with the enemy or its agents; the growing contradictions between anti-imperialist states; and finally, the threat to world peace posed by the prospect of atomic war on the part of imperialism. All these factors reinforce the action of imperialism against the national liberation movements.

If the repeated interventions and growing aggressiveness of imperialism against the peoples can be interpreted as a sign of desperation faced with the size of the national liberation movements, they can also be explained to a certain extent by the weaknesses produced by these unfavourable factors within the general front of the anti-imperialist struggle.

On the internal level, we believe that the most important weaknesses or unfavourable factors are inherent in the socioeconomic structure and in the tendencies of its evolution under imperialist pressure, or to be more precise in the little or no attention paid to the characteristics of this structure and these tendencies by the national liberation movements in deciding on the strategy of their struggles.

By saying this we do not wish to diminish the importance of other internal factors which are unfavourable to national liberation, such as economic under-development, the consequent social and cultural backwardness of the popular masses, tribalism and other contradictions of lesser importance. It should however be pointed out that the existence of tribes only manifests itself as an important contradiction as a function of opportunistic attitudes, generally on the part of detribalised individuals or groups, within the national liberation movements. Contradictions between classes, even when only embryonic, are of far greater importance than contradictions between tribes.

Although the colonial and neo-colonial situations are identical in essence, and the main aspect of the struggle against imperialism is neo-colonialist, we feel it is vital to distinguish in practice these two situations. In fact the horizontal structure, however it may differ from the native society, and the absence of a political power composed of national elements in the colonial situation make possible the creation of a wide front of unity and struggle, which is vital to the success of the national liberation movement. But this possibility does not remove the need for a rigorous analysis of the native social structure, of the tendencies of its evolution, and for the adoption in practice of appropriate measures for ensuring true national liberation. While recognising that each movement knows best what to do in its own case, one of these measures seems to us indispensable, namely the creation of a firmly united vanguard, conscious of the true meaning and objective of the national liberation struggle which it must lead. This necessity is all the more urgent since we know that with rare exceptions the colonial situation neither permits nor needs the existence of significant vanguard classes (working class conscious of its existence and rural proletariat) which could ensure the vigilance of the popular masses over the evolution of the liberation movement. On the contrary, the generally embryonic character of the working classes and the economic, social and cultural situation of the physical force of most importance in the national liberation struggle-the peasantry-do not allow these two main forces to distinguish true national independence from fictitious political independence. Only a revolutionary vanguard, generally an active minority, can be aware of this distinction from the start and make it known, through the struggle, to the popular masses. This explains the fundamentally political nature of the national liberation struggle and to a certain extent makes the form of struggle important in the final result of the phenomenon of national liberation.

In the neo-colonial situation the more or less vertical structure of the native society and the existence of a political power composed of native elements-national state-already worsen the contradictions within that society and make difficult if not impossible the creation of as wide a front as in the colonial situation. On the one hand the material effects (mainly the nationalisation of cadres and the increased economic initiative of the native elements, particularly in the commercial field) and the psychological effects (pride in the belief of being ruled by one's own compatriots, exploitation of religious or tribal solidarity between some leaders and a fraction of the masses) together demobilise a considerable part of the nationalist forces. But on the other hand the necessarily repressive nature of the neocolonial state against the national liberation forces, the sharpening of contradictions between classes, the objective permanence of signs and agents of foreign domination (settlers who retain their privileges, armed forces, racial discrimination), the growing poverty of the peasantry and the more or less notorious influence of external factors all contribute towards keeping the flame of nationalism alive, towards progressively raising the consciousness of wide popular sectors and towards reuniting the majority of the population, on the very basis of awareness of neo-colonialist frustration, around the ideal of national liberation. In addition, while the native ruling class becomes progressively more bourgeois, the development of a working class composed of urban workers and agricultural proletarians, all exploited by the indirect domination of imperialism opens up new perspectives for the evolution of national liberation. This working class, whatever the level of its political consciousness (given a certain minimum, namely the awareness of its own needs), seems to constitute the true popular vanguard of the national liberation struggle in the neo-colonial case. However it will not be able to completely fulfil its mission in this struggle (which does not end with the gaining of independence) unless it firmly unites with the other exploited strata, the peasants in general (hired men, sharecroppers, tenants and small farmers) and the nationalist petty bourgeoisie. The creation of this alliance demands the mobilisation and organisation of the nationalist forces within the framework (or by the action) of a strong and well-structured political organisation.

Another important distinction between the colonial and neocolonial situations is in the prospects for the struggle. The colonial situation (in which the nation class fights the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie of the colonising country) can lead, apparently at least, to a nationalist solution (national revolution); the nation gains its independence and theoretically adopts the economic structure which best suits it. The neo-colonial situation (in which the working classes and their allies struggle simultaneously against the imperialist bourgeoisie and the native ruling class) is not resolved by a nationalist solution; it demands the destruction of the capitalist structure implanted in the national territory by imperialism, and correctly postulates a socialist solution.

This distinction arises mainly from the different levels of the productive forces in the two cases and the consequent sharpening of the class struggle.

It would not be difficult to show that in time the distinction becomes scarcely apparent. It is sufficient to recall that in our present historical situation-elimination of imperialism which uses every means to perpetuate its domination over our peoples, and consolidation of socialism throughout a large part of the world-there are only two possible paths for an independent nation: to return to imperialist domination (neo-colonialism, capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of socialism. This operation, on which depends the compensation for the effects and sacrifices of the popular masses during the struggle, is considerably influenced by the form of struggle and the degree of revolutionary consciousness of those who lead it. The facts make it unnecessary for us to prove that the essential instrument of imperialist domination is violence. If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see that there is not, and cannot be national liberation without the use of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces. There is no people on earth which, having been subjected to the imperialist yoke (colonialist or neo-colonialist), has managed to gain its independence (nominal or effective) without victims. The important thing is to determine which forms of violence have to be used by the national liberation forces in order not only to answer the violence of imperialism but also to ensure through the struggle the final victory of their cause, true national independence. The past and present experiences of various peoples, the present situation of national liberation struggles in the world (especially in Vietnam, the Congo and Zimbabwe) as well as the situation of permanent violence, or at least of contradictions and upheavals, in certain countries which have gained their independence by the so-called peaceful way, show us not only that compromises with imperialism do not work, but also that the normal way of national liberation, imposed on peoples by imperialist repression, is armed struggle.

We do not think we will shock this assembly by stating that the only effective way of definitively fulfilling the aspirations of the peoples, that is to say of attaining national liberation, is by armed struggle. This is the great lesson which the contemporary history of liberation struggle teaches all those who are truly committed to the effort of liberating their peoples.

It is obvious that both the effectiveness of this way and the stability of the situation to which it leads after liberation depend not only on the characteristics of the organisation of the struggle but also on the political and moral awareness of those who, for historical reasons, are capable of being the immediate heirs of the colonial or neo-colonial state. For events have shown that the only social sector capable of being aware of the reality of imperialist domination and of directing the state apparatus inherited from this domination is the native petty bourgeoisie. If we bear in mind the aleatory characteristics and the complexity of the tendencies naturally inherent in the economic situation of this social stratum or class, we will see that this specific inevitability in our situation constitutes one of the weaknesses of the national liberation movement.

The colonial situation, which does not permit the development of a native pseudo-bourgeoisie and in which the popular masses do not generally reach the necessary level of political consciousness before the advent of the phenomenon of national liberation, offers the petty bourgeoisie the historical opportunity of leading the struggle against foreign domination, since by nature of its objective and subjective position (higher standard of living than that of the masses, more frequent contact with the agents of colonialism, and hence more chances of being humiliated, higher level of education and political awareness, etc.) it is the stratum which most rapidly becomes aware of the need to free itself from foreign domination. This historical responsibility is assumed by the sector of the petty bourgeoisie which, in the colonial context, can be called revolutionary, while other sectors retain the doubts characteristic of these classes or ally themselves to colonialism so as to defend, albeit illusorily, their social situation.

The neo-colonial situation, which demands the elimination of the native pseudo-bourgeoisie so that national liberation can be attained, also offers the petty bourgeoisie the chance of playing a role of major and even decisive importance in the struggle for the elimination of foreign domination. But in this case, by virtue of the progress made in the social structure, the function of leading the struggle is shared (to a greater or lesser extent) with the more educated sectors of the working classes and even with some elements of the national pseudo-bourgeoisie who are inspired by patriotic sentiments. The role of the sector of the petty bourgeoisie which participates in leading the struggle is all the more important since it is a fact that in the neo-colonial situation it is the most suitable sector to assume these functions, both because of the economic and cultural limitations of the working masses, and because of the complexes and limitations of an ideological nature which characterise the sector of the national pseudo-bourgeoisie which supports the struggle. In this case it is important to note that the role with which it is entrusted demands from this sector of the petty bourgeoisie a greater revolutionary consciousness, and the capacity for faithfully interpreting the aspirations of the masses in each phase of the struggle and for identifying themselves more and more with the masses.

But however high the degree of revolutionary consciousness of the sector of the petty bourgeoisie called on to fulfill this historical function, it cannot free itself from one objective reality: the petty bourgeoisie, as a service class (that is to say that a class not directly involved in the process of production) does not possess the economic base to guarantee the taking over of power. In fact history has shown that whatever the role-sometimes important-played by individuals coming from the petty bourgeoisie in the process of a revolution, this class has never possessed political control. And it could never possess it, since political control (the state) is based on the economic capacity of the ruling class, and in the conditions of colonial and neo-colonial society this capacity is retained by two entities: imperialist capital and the native working classes.

To retain the power which national liberation puts in its hands, the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois, to permit the development of a bureaucratic and intermediary bourgeoisie in the commercial cycle, in order to transform itself into a national pseudo-bourgeoisie, that is to say in order to negate the revolution and necessarily ally itself with imperialist capital. Now all this corresponds to the neo-colonial situation, that is, to the betrayal of the objectives of national liberation. In order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one choice: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to reject the temptations of becoming more bourgeois and the natural concerns of its class mentality, to identify itself with the working classes and not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to truly fulfil the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.

This alternative-to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class-constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle. The positive solution in favour of the revolution depends on what Fidel Castro recently correctly called the development of revolutionary consciousness. This dependence necessarily calls our attention to the capacity of the leader of the national liberation struggle to remain faithful to the principles and to the fundamental cause of this struggle. This shows us, to a certain extent, that if national liberation is essentially a political problem, the conditions for its development give it certain characteristics which belong to the sphere of morals.
We will not shout hurrahs or proclaim here our solidarity with this or that people in struggle. Our presence is in itself a cry of condemnation of imperialism and a proof of solidarity with all peoples who want to banish from their country the imperialist yoke, and in particular with the heroic people of Vietnam. But we firmly believe that the best proof we can give of our anti- imperialist position and of our active solidarity with our comrades in this common struggle is to return to our countries, to further develop this struggle and to remain faithful to the principles and objectives of national liberation.

Our wish is that every national liberation movement represented here may be able to repeat in its own country, arms in hand, in unison with its people, the already legendary cry of Cuba:

PATRIA 0 MUERTE, VENCEREMOS!
DEATH TO THE FORCES OF IMPERIALISM!
FREE, PROSPEROUS AND HAPPY COUNTRY FOR EACH OF OUR
PEOPLES!
VENCEREMOS!

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(1966) Amilcar Cabral, "The Weapon of Theory" *

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In 1966 Amilcar Cabral was the Secretary-General and President of the War Council of the P.A.I. G. C. (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde). In January 1966 he delivered an address to the first Tricontinental Conference of the peoples of Asia, ...

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How Transatlantic Slave Trade Shaped Epidemiology Today

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Our troubling past is a reminder of how medical advances can occur on the backs of human beings with no say in the matter.

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The Many-Headed Monster: Cambridge Symposium

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The Many-Headed Monster: Cambridge Symposium

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Those of us who think that historical research ought to consist of more than the study of kings, ministers and generals owe a great debt to the pioneers of 'history from below'. Foremost amongst them must be E.P. Thompson, who published his epic The Making of the English Working Class exactly half a century ago. The impressive wave of work that followed will be well-known to many of you and, if nothing else, I think most historians would agree that historical scholarship would be poorer if not for the intervention of these spirited men and women.

But what about the next fifty years? Has 'history from below', and perhaps social history more generally, outlived its usefulness? What, if anything, can it contribute to contemporary scholarship and the wider world? How should it be adapted or reoriented in the coming years? What new tools or techniques could strengthen it? Where will it fit in the wider academic and social landscape?

Across two workshops in the spring and summer of 2013 - one held at Birkbeck in April, one held at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in July - we brought together a total of almost fifty historians to try to figure out some answers to these questions. As is usually the case with these events, the discussions carried on in the pub afterwards and, although we certainly didn't come up with any conclusive answers, participants at both events agreed this was a conversation that needed to continue.

To that end, we invited the participants to contribute to an online symposium on the future of 'history from below'. So, throughout July and August 2013 we published a series of short pieces by historians - some early in their academic careers, others well established - that attempt to offer some possible answers to these questions. We hope that this spurs further discussion and opens up the conversation to the rest of the world. Please leap in with your comments, suggestions and critiques. We welcome comments not only from 'fellow travellers' but also - perhaps especially - from sceptics and critics of 'history from below'.

Authors will be notified of any comments that their pieces receive, so please add your thoughts any time or join the conversation on twitter via #historyfrombelow.
Table of Contents
Part I - Birkbeck Event Participants

Richard Blakemore, 'Finding fragments: the past and the future'

Ruth Mather, 'The home-making of the English working class'

Nicola Whyte, 'Landscape history from below'

William Farrell, 'Global history from below?'

Matt Jackson, 'Relocating history from below: places, spaces, databases'

Mark Hailwood, 'Who is below?'

David Hitchcock, 'Why history from below matters more than ever'

Simon Sandall, 'History lessons from below?'

Samantha Shave, 'History for below'

Brodie Waddell, 'History from below: today and tomorrow'

Part II - Cambridge Event Participants
If referencing pieces published here, we suggest the following citation:

Author, 'Title', in Mark Hailwood and Brodie Waddell (eds), The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium (2013) [https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/]

**Readers might also be interested in the following blog post on 'A New History from Below' by one of our commentators from the Cambridge event, Tim Hitchcock: http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/new-history-from-below.html

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The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium Those of us who think that historical research ought to consist of more than the study of kings, ministers and generals owe a great debt to the pioneers of 'history from below'. Foremost amongst them must be E.P.

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ittle is yet known of Bussa, the man behind the largest slave revolt on Barbados in 1816, but information about his life before this uprising could well lie in the columns of contemporary island newspapers. So too may further clues about what happened to Benebah, a pregnant black woman who stood up to a police officer on the island in 1834, after slavery had officially been abolished.

The missing history of these two rebels, along with many other enslaved peoples' stories, are hiding in plain sight in vast, freshly digitised newspaper records from the island. And now the British Library is to lend its scholastic firepower and invite online volunteers to help to uncover it.

Such evidence would paint a valuable picture of the otherwise anonymous world of commercial slavery during British colonial rule. For, while much of the paperwork surrounding the trade did not use names, if someone rebelled, or attempted escape, their identity and description often appeared in a paid advertisement.

"These fugitive adverts, while created by enslavers, were born out of acts of resistance by those who were enslaved," said Graham Jevon of the British Library.

"The casual normalisation of these adverts can be hard to read but each represents an individual resisting oppression - and in some cases is the only real recognition that a person existed, and almost certainly the only record of a person's appearance, personality, and connections."

Agents of Enslavement, a collaboration between the Barbados Department of Archives and the British Library, launches on Tuesday,making thousands of pages available to researchers and amateur historians to create a new resource for people in Barbados and Britain to find out about their ancestors.

The newspapers themselves remain in Barbados but have been digitised using a grant from the Endangered Archives Programme(EAP). The surviving pages were in an "exceptionally vulnerable" condition, said Jevon, due to their age and the tropical climate.

"The crowdsourcing will unlock some of the secrets hidden within these newspapers. While the digital copies are now freely available to view on the EAP website, the information can only be found by a close reading of every page. We need people to help us do this," said Jevon, who will personally be looking out for one rebel name above others.

"Historical records of Bussa are scant. Exactly who he was and whether he did actually lead the rebellion has been a matter of some debate. I don't expect to find evidence of his lead role in the rebellion but I will be particularly keen to keep an eye out for any pre-1816 references to the name Bussa."

Jevon will also be scanning for mentions of Benebah, whose story he came across by chance. "While glancing through the newspapers, I stumbled across an article which described a near-fatal incident between a police officer and a pregnant black woman named Benebah," he said.

One of the Barbados newspaper advertisements seeking runaway slaves. Photograph: Graham Jevon/Barbados Archives / Endangered Archives Programme

Although slavery had been abolished, Benebah was still held in the transitional "apprenticeship" system and, according to a report in the Globe, stood her ground when Thomas Green, a police officer, took a loose goat from the market.

When the goat was claimed by Benebah, he refused to return it unless she paid him. During an abusive confrontation later in the market the officer became violent.

"He grabbed Benebah, intent on dragging her to the police station," Jevon said. "She resisted; clenched her teeth on his hand. Green responded, pulled her towards him, and forced his knee into her abdomen. Benebah threw the officer to the floor, before others joined the scuffle and the officer was retrieved by two colleagues."

Green was sent to prison by a magistrate but was then swiftly released on the basis of a certificate from a Dr Cleare stating that "the woman [was] in no immediate danger".

"This provides a snapshot into the life of a young woman who would otherwise be forgotten by history," said Jevon. "It is an example of the way that these newspapers can be used to start to identify people and then to trace their stories."

The adverts were mostly posted by English owners, and the project hopes to expose any patterns behind the escape attempts. Were enslaved people more likely to run away from absentee enslavers based in Britain or from enslavers living in Barbados? But the main aim is to identify more enslaved people and their individual acts of resistance. "Unlike 'for sale' adverts, in which enslaved people are anonymised, the fugitive adverts required detailed descriptions to achieve their objective of recapturing people," said Jevon. "These adverts therefore contain names, ages, detailed physical descriptions and often the names and locations of a fugitive's family and friends."

A community workshop with the Barbados newspapers. Photograph: Barbados Archives / Endangered Archives Programme

The history of the period is obscured by the custom of giving enslaved people their enslavers' names, but it can also make things clearer. Benebah was a common name in Barbados, with no set spelling. But the Benebah of interest to Jevon can be recognised because the newspaper article mentions she was apprenticed by John Piggot Maynard. "I was able to trace Benebah's initial registration as a 13-year-old in 1817 to her final registration in 1834 when, aged 30, she was gifted to John Maynard's seven-year-old daughter by a man named Richard Grannum," he said.

Those enslaved in Barbados were predominantly black and descended from Africans, although early in the colonisation period there were also white indentured servants. Some native Americans were also enslaved. By the 19 th century, most were born in Barbados, rather than Africa, and so the white community in Barbados was not as widely opposed to the 1807 act to abolish the slave trade as others were. Barbados no longer needed to import labour.

All the same, after an 1823 revolt in Demerara, the Barbadian launched a strong editorial attack on the abolitionist African Institution and its leading figures, including William Wilberforce. It blamed them for disorder and called them "a junta of fanatics ... specious friends of humanity, who have not one spark of Christian feeling for the millions of human beings of their own colour".

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Secrets of rebel slaves in Barbados will finally be revealed

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ittle is yet known of Bussa, the man behind the largest slave revolt on Barbados in 1816, but information about his life before this uprising could well lie in the columns of contemporary island newspapers.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion#Revolts_on_the_Caribbean_Islands

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A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by enslaved people, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of enslaved people have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population. Many of the events, however, are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.

The most successful slave rebellion in history was the 18th-century Haitian Revolution, led by Toussaint Louverture and later Jean-Jacques Dessalines who won the war against their French colonial rulers, which established the modern independent state of Haiti from the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. Another famous historic slave rebellion was led by the Roman slave Spartacus (c. 73-71 BC). In the ninth century, the poet-prophet Ali bin Muhammad led imported East African slaves in Iraq during the Zanj Rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate; Nanny of the Maroons was an 18th-century leader who rebelled against the British in Jamaica; and the Quilombo dos Palmares of Brazil flourished under Ganazumba (Ganga Zumba). The 1811 German Coast Uprising in the Territory of Orleans was the largest rebellion in the continental United States; Denmark Vesey rebelled in South Carolina, and Madison Washington during the Creole case in the 19th century the United States.

Ancient Sparta had a special type of serf called who were often treated harshly, leading them to rebel. According to Herodotus (IX, 28-29), helots were seven times as numerous as Spartans. Every autumn, according to Plutarch ( Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3-7), the Spartan ephors would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear of blood or guilt in order to keep them in line ().

In the Roman Empire, though the heterogeneous nature of the slave population worked against a strong sense of solidarity, slave revolts did occur and were severely punished. The most famous slave rebellion in Europe was led by Spartacus in Roman Italy, the Third Servile War. This war resulted in the 6000 surviving rebel slaves being crucified along the main roads leading into Rome. This was the third in a series of unrelated Servile Wars fought by slaves against the Romans.

The English peasants' revolt of 1381 led to calls for the reform of feudalism in England and an increase in rights for serfs. The Peasants' Revolt was one of several popular revolts in late medieval Europe. Richard II agreed to reforms including fair rents and the abolition of serfdom. Following the collapse of the revolt, the king's concessions were quickly revoked, but the rebellion is significant because it marked the beginning of the end of serfdom in medieval England.

In Russia, the slaves were usually classified as kholops. A kholop's master had unlimited power over his life. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. During the 16th and 17th centuries, runaway serfs and kholops known as Cossacks, ("outlaws") formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes. There were numerous rebellions against slavery and serfdom, most often in conjunction with Cossack uprisings, such as the uprisings of Ivan Bolotnikov (1606-1607), Stenka Razin (1667-1671), Kondraty Bulavin (1707-1709), and Yemelyan Pugachev (1773-1775), often involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. Between the end of the Pugachev rebellion and the beginning of the 19th century, there were hundreds of outbreaks across Russia.

Numerous African slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is documented evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving 10 or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in the Richmond, Virginia area in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

The Zanj Rebellion was the culmination of a series of small revolts. It took place near the city of Basra, in southern Iraq over fifteen years (869−883 AD). It grew to involve over 500,000 slaves, who were imported from across the Muslim empire.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

In the 3rd century BCE, Drimakos (or Drimachus) led a slave revolt on the slave entrepot of Chios, took to the hills and directed a band of runaways in operations against their ex-masters.

The Servile Wars (135 to 71 BCE) were a series of slave revolts within the Roman Republic.

Other slave revolts occurred elsewhere.

A number of slave revolts occurred in the Mediterranean area during the early modern period:

1748: Hungarian, Georgian and Maltese slaves on board the Ottoman ship Lupa revolted and sailed the ship to Malta.

1749: Conspiracy of the Slaves - Muslim slaves in Malta planned to rebel and take over the island, but plans leaked out beforehand and the would-be rebels were arrested and many were executed.

1760: Christian slaves on board the Ottoman ship Corona Ottomana revolted and sailed the ship to Malta.

São Tomé and Príncipe

On 9 July 1595, Rei Amador, and his people, the Angolars, allied with other enslaved Africans of its plantations, marched into the interior woods and battled against the Portuguese. It is said that day, Rei Amador and his followers raised a flag in front of the settlers and proclaimed Rei Amador as king of São Tomé and Príncipe, making himself as "Rei Amador, liberator of all the black people".

Between 1595 and 1596, the island of São Tomé was ruled by the Angolars, under the command of Rei Amador. On 4 January 1596, he was captured, sent to prison and was later executed by the Portuguese. Still today, they remember him fondly and consider him a national hero of the islands.

In the first decades of the 17th century, there were frequent slave revolts in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the African shore, which damaged the sugar crop cultivation there.

December 25, 1522 rebellion in Diego Colón de Toledo's plantation in what is known today as Santo Domingo is the first known slave rebellion of the region.

Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil, 1605 to 1694, led by Zumbi dos Palmarés.

San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia, 16th century to the present, led by Benkos Biohó.

St. John, 1733, in what was then the Danish West Indies. The St. John's Slave Rebellion is one of the earliest and longest lasting slave rebellions in the Americas. It ended with defeat, however, and many rebels, including one of the leaders Breffu, committed suicide rather than being recaptured.

The most successful slave uprising was the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and was eventually led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, culminating in the independent black republic of Haiti.

Panama also has an extensive history of slave rebellions going back to the 16th century. Slaves were brought to the isthmus from many regions in Africa, including the modern day countries of the Congo, Senegal, Guinea, and Mozambique. Immediately before their arrival on shore, or very soon after, many enslaved Africans revolted against their captors or participated in mass maroonage or desertion. The freed Africans founded communities in the forests and mountains, organized guerrilla bands known as Cimarrones. They began a long guerrilla war against the Spanish Conquistadores, sometimes in conjunction with nearby indigenous communities like the Kuna and the Guaymí. Despite massacres by the Spanish, the rebels fought until the Spanish crown was forced to concede to treaties that granted the Africans a life without Spanish violence and incursions. The leaders of the guerrilla revolts included Felipillo, Bayano, Juan de Dioso, Domingo Congo, Antón Mandinga, and Luis de Mozambique.

In the 1730s, the militias of the Colony of Jamaica fought the Jamaican Maroons for a decade, before agreeing to sign peace treaties in 1739 and 1740, which recognised their freedom in five separate Maroon Towns.

Tacky's War (1760) was a slave uprising in Jamaica, which ran from May to July before it was put down by the British colonial government.

The Suriname slave rebellion was marked by constant guerrilla warfare by Maroons and in 1765-1793 by the Aluku. This rebellion was led by Boni.

The Berbice slave revolt in Guyana in 1763 was led by Cuffy.

Cuba had slave revolts in 1795, 1798, 1802, 1805, 1812 (the Aponte revolt), 1825, 1827, 1829, 1833, 1834, 1835, 1838, 1839-43 and 1844 (the La Escalera conspiracy and revolt).

Vincent Brown, a professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard, has made a study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 2013, Brown teamed up with Axis Maps to create an interactive map of Jamaican slave uprisings in the 18th century called, "Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, A Cartographic Narrative." Brown's efforts have shown that the slave insurrection in Jamaica in 1760-61 was a carefully planned affair and not a spontaneous, chaotic eruption, as was often argued (due in large part to the lack of written records produced by the insurgents).

Later, in 1795, several slave rebellions broke out across the Caribbean, influenced by the Haitian Revolution:

In Jamaica, the descendants of Africans who fought and escaped from slavery and established free communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica (Maroons), fought to preserve their freedom from British colonialists, in what came to be known as the Second Maroon War. However, this featured just one of the five Maroon towns in Jamaica.

In Dominica there was the Colihault Uprising.

In Saint Lucia there was the Bush War.

In the Saint Vincent islands the Second Carib War broke out.

Curaçao had a slave revolt in 1795, led by Tula.

In Venezuela, the insurrection led by José Leonardo Chirino occurred in 1795.

In Barbados, a slave revolt occurred in 1816, led by Bussa.

In Guyana there was the Demerara Rebellion of 1795.

In the British Virgin Islands, minor slave revolts occurred in 1790, 1823 and 1830.

In the Danish West Indies an 1848 slave revolt led to emancipation of all slaves in the Danish West Indies.

In Puerto Rico in 1821, Marcos Xiorro planned and conspired to lead a slave revolt against the sugar plantation owners and the Spanish Colonial government. Even though the conspiracy was unsuccessful, Xiorro achieved legendary status among the slaves and is part of Puerto Rico's folklore.

Many slave rebellions occurred in Brazil, most famously the Bahia Rebellion of 1822-1830 and the Malê Revolt of 1835 by the predominantly Muslim West African slaves at the time. The term malê was commonly used to refer to Muslims at the time from the Yoruba word imale.

Numerous black slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is documentary evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving ten or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.

Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness invented by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that allegedly caused black slaves to run away. Today, drapetomania is considered an example of pseudoscience, and part of the edifice of scientific racism.

Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.

The 1811 German Coast Uprising, which took place in rural southeast Louisiana, at that time the Territory of Orleans, early in 1811, involved up to 500 insurgent slaves. It was suppressed by white militias and a detachment of the United States Army. In retaliation for the deaths of two white men and the destruction of property, the authorities killed at least 40 black men in a violent confrontation (the numbers cited are inconsistent); at least 29 more were executed (combined figures from two jurisdictions, St. Charles Parish and Orleans Parish). There was a third jurisdiction for a tribunal and what amounted to summary judgments against the accused, St. John the Baptist Parish. Fewer than 20 men are said to have escaped; some of those were later caught and killed, on their way to freedom.

Although only involving about seventy slaves and free Blacks, Turner's 1831 rebellion is considered to be a significant event in American history. The rebellion caused the slave-holding South to go into a panic. Fifty-five men, women, and children were killed, and enslaved Blacks freed on multiple plantations in Southampton County, Virginia, as Turner and his fellow rebels attacked the White institution of plantation slavery. Turner and the other rebels were eventually stopped by state White militias (Aptheker, 1993). The rebellion resulted in the hanging of about 56 slaves, including Nat Turner himself. Up to 200 other blacks were killed during the hysteria which followed, few of whom likely had anything to do with the uprising. Fears afterwards led to new legislation passed by Southern states prohibiting the movement, assembly, and education of slaves, and reducing the rights of free people of color. In addition, the Virginia legislature considered abolishing slavery to prevent further rebellions. In a close vote, however, the state decided to keep slaves.

The abolitionist John Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Bleeding Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. This raid was a joint attack by former slaves, freed blacks, and white men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to create a general uprising among slaves. Brown carried hundreds of copies of the constitution for a new republic of former slaves in the Appalachians. But they were never distributed, and the slave uprisings that were to have helped Brown did not happen. Some believe that he knew the raid was doomed but went ahead anyway, because of the support for abolition it would (and did) generate. The U.S. military, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, easily overwhelmed Brown's forces. But directly following this, slave disobedience and the number of runaways increased markedly in Virginia.

The historian Steven Hahn proposes that the self-organized involvement of slaves in the Union Army during the American Civil War composed a slave rebellion that dwarfed all others. Similarly, tens of thousands of slaves joined British forces or escaped to British lines during the American Revolution, sometimes using the disruption of war to gain freedom. For instance, when the British evacuated from Charleston and Savannah, they took 10,000 slaves with them. They also evacuated slaves from New York, taking more than 3,000 for resettlement to Nova Scotia, where they were recorded as Black Loyalists and given land grants.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

In 1808 and 1825, there were slave rebellions in the Cape Colony, newly acquired by the British. Although the slave trade was officially abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807, and slavery itself a generation later with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, it took until 1850 to be halted in the territories which were to become South Africa.

There are 485 recorded instances of slaves revolting on board slave ships. A few of these ships endured more than one uprising during their career.

Most accounts of revolts aboard slave ships are given by Europeans. There are few examples of accounts by slaves themselves. William Snelgrave reported that the slaves that revolted on the British ship Henry in 1721 claimed that those who had captured them were "Rogues to buy them" and that they were bent on regaining their liberty. Another example that Richardson gives is that of James Towne who gives the account of slaves stating that Europeans did not have the right to enslave and take them away from their homeland and "wives and children."

Richardson compares several factors that contributed to slave revolts on board ships: conditions on the ships, geographical location, and proximity to the shore. He suggests that revolts were more likely to occur when a ship was still in sight of the shore. The threat of attack from the shore by other Africans was also a concern. If the ship was hit by disease and a large portion of the crew had been killed, the chances of insurrection were higher. Where the slaves were captured also had an effect on the amount of insurrections. In many places, such as the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, the percentage of revolts and the percentage of the slave trade match up. Yet ships taking slaves from Senegambia experienced 22 percent of shipboard revolts while only contributing to four and a half percent of the slave trade. Slaves coming from West Central Africa accounted for 44 percent of the trade while only experiencing 11 percent of total revolts.

Lorenzo J. Greene gives many accounts of slave revolts on ships coming out of New England. These ships belonged to Puritans who controlled much of the slave trade in New England. Most revolts on board ships were unsuccessful. The crews of these ships, while outnumbered, were disciplined, well fed, and armed with muskets, swords, and sometimes cannons, and they were always on guard for resistance. The slaves on the other hand were the opposite, armed only with bits of wood and the chains that bound them.

However, some captives were able to take over the ships that were their prisons and regain their freedom. On October 5, 1764 the New Hampshire ship Adventure captained by John Millar was successfully taken by its cargo. The slaves on board revolted while the ship was anchored off the coast and all but two of the crew, including Captain Millar, had succumbed to disease. Another successful slave revolt occurred six days after the ship Little George had left the Guinea coast. The ship carried ninety-six slaves, thirty-five of which were male. The slaves attacked in the early hours of the morning, easily overpowering the two men on guard. The slaves were able to get one of the cannons on board loaded and fired it at the crew. After taking control of the ship they sailed it up the Sierra Leone River and escaped. After having defended themselves for several days below decks with muskets the crew lowered a small boat into the river to escape. After nine days of living off of raw rice they were rescued.

There is one factor that is not addressed by either Richardson or Greene. That is of enslaved sailors on slave ships. While Mariana P. Candido doesn't write explicitly on revolts, she does discuss there being enslaved Africans working on the ships that transported other Africans into slavery. These men, 230 in all, were used onboard of slave ships for their ability to communicate with the slaves being brought on board and to translate between Captain and Slaver. Enslaved sailors were able to alleviate some of the fears that newly boarded slaves had, such as being eaten. This was a double-edged sword. The enslaved sailors sometimes joined other slaves in the revolts against the captain they served. In 1812 enslaved sailors joined a revolt on board the Portuguese ship Feliz Eugenia just off the coast of Benguela. The revolt took place below decks. The sailors, along with many of the children that were on board, were able to escape using small boats.

Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 6. ed., New York: International Publ., 1993 - classic

Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against African Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006

David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001

Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, Louisiana State University Press 1980

Joao Jose Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture), Johns Hopkins Univ Press 1993

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007.

1. ^ Cartledge, Paul A.; Harvey, F. David, eds. (1985). Crux: Essays in Greek History Presented to G.E.M. De Ste. Croix on His 75th Birthday. History of Political Thought. 6 (Reprint ed.). Duckworth. p. 39. ISBN 9780715620922. [Drimakos] took to the mountains of Chios and organized a band of runaways to carry out guerilla operations against the landed property of their former masters.

2. ^ Urbainczyk, Theresa (2008). "Maintaining resistance". Slave Revolts in Antiquity. London: Routledge (published 2016). pp. 30-31. ISBN 9781315478807.

3. ^ Castillo, Dennis Angelo (2006). The Maltese Cross: A Strategic History of Malta. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 91. ISBN 9780313323294.

4. ^ Deive, Carlos Esteban (1989). Los guerrilleros negros: esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo (in Spanish). Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Fundación Cultural Dominicana. OCLC 21435953.

5. ^ Holly Kathryn Norton (2013). Estate by Estate: The Landscape of the 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion (PhD). Syracuse University. p. 90. ProQuest 1369397993.

6. ^ "The fédons of Grenada, 1763-1814" Archived 2008-08-31 at the Wayback Machine. Posted by Curtis Jacobs. Retrieved March 10, 2013, to 18: 25 pm.

7. ^ McGowan, Winston (2006). "The 1763 and 1823 slave rebellions". Starbucks News. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007.

8. "Slave revolts in Puerto Rico: conspiracies and uprisings, 1795-1873"; by: Guillermo A. Bar alt; Publisher Markus Wiener Publishers; ^ ISBN 1-55876-463-1, ISBN 978-1-55876-463-7

9. "A Continuity of the 19th Century Jihaad Movements of Western Sudan". Muhammad Sharif.

10. ^ Shapiro, Herbert. "The Impact of the Aptheker Thesis: A Retrospective View of American Negro Slave Revolts". Science and Society.

11. Louis A. DeCaro Jr., ^ John Brown - The Cost of Freedom: Selections from His Life & Letters (New York: International Publishers, 2007), p. 16.

12. ^ Hahn, Steven (2004). "The Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History: Southern Slaves in the American Civil War". southernspaces.org.

13. Peter Kolchin, ^ American Slavery: 1619-1877, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, pp. 73-77

14. Joseph Cephas Carroll, ^ Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865, p. 13

15. Sherman, Joan R (1997). Black Bard of North Carolina : George Moses Horton and His Poetry. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p. 4. ISBN 0807823414.

16. ^ Rasmussen, Daniel (2011). American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt. HarperCollins. p. 288.

17. ^ "Slave Revolt of 1842". Digital.library.okstate.edu. Archived from the original on 2012-11-03.

18. ^ Giliomee, Hermann (2003). "The Afrikaners", Chapter 4 - Masters, Slaves and Servants, the fear of gelykstelling, Page 93,94

19. Richardson, David (January 2001). "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade". The William and Mary Quarterly. 3. 58 (1): 72. doi:10.2307/2674419. JSTOR 2674419. PMID 18634185.

20. ^ Richardson, David (January 2001). "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade". The William and Mary Quarterly. 3. 58 (1): 69-92. doi:10.2307/2674419. JSTOR 2674419. PMID 18634185.

21. ^ Richardson, David (2001). "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade". The William and Mary Quarterly. 58 (1): 69-92. doi:10.2307/2674419. JSTOR 2674419. PMID 18634185.

22. Candido, Mariana P. (September 2010). "Different Slave Journeys: Enslaved African Seamen on Board Portuguese Ships c. 1760-1820s". 31 (3): 400.

23. ^ Candido, Mariana P. (September 2010). "Different Slave Journeys: Enslaved African Seamen on Board Portuguese Ships c. 1760-1820s". 31 (3).

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A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by enslaved people, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of enslaved people have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population.

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Some slaves resisted by planning rebellions. They risked reprisals of torture and death. Some plantations were destroyed by the violence and people killed. The constant unrest reduced the profits made by the plantation owners.

Slave rebellions varied in size and most were put down with the help of forces from either the British Army or the Royal Navy. Most colonies suffered a rebellion once every 20 years. Notable revolts include:

Antigua 1736 - Plantation owners on Antigua discovered a slave plot to steal gunpowder and blow up the island's gentry at a ball. As punishment, over the next six months 88 slaves were put to death, most of them by being burned alive.

Tacky's Revolt 1760 - Tacky's Revolt erupted on Jamaica. This was the largest British slave uprising of the 18th century.

Saint Domingue 1791 - A slave revolt on the French-controlled island of Saint Domingue was led by Toussaint L'Overture.

The French government failed to suppress the rebellion and Saint Domingue was eventually renamed 'Haiti' by the freed slaves, who set up the first free black republic.

The Haitian Revolution removed Britain's major competitor (France) in sugar production in the Caribbean.

Grenada 1796 - Fédon's slave revolt in Grenada was defeated by British troops.

Barbados 1816 - Slaves rose up on Barbados and burned a quarter of the island's sugar crop before the rebellion was suppressed.

Jamaica 1831 - During a massive slave rebellion in Jamaica, more than 20,000 rebels seized control of the north-west corner of the island, setting planters' houses on fire.

It took the British Army and militia a month to restore order. Some 200 enslaved Africans and 14 white people died in the fighting. At least 340 rebel slaves were hanged or shot afterwards.

The Maroons

The 'Maroons' of Jamaica were a mixture of indigenous islanders and runaway slaves hiding out on the island.

They posed a particular problem to plantation owners as for over 80 years they held out and lived in the mountains, free from British rule. From their remote hideouts they mounted raids on the plantations.

By the 1730s they were actually at war with the British army. They used guerrilla warfare to hold out against the British forces. In 1739, a treaty was drawn up between the British and the Maroons to make peace. This gave the Maroons some land and the Maroons promised not to take in any further runaway slaves.

The video below discusses the story of the Jamaican Maroons and runaways.

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Slave revolts 1736-1832 - The captives' experience and slave resistance - National 5 History Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Some slaves resisted by planning rebellions. They risked reprisals of torture and death. Some plantations were destroyed by the violence and people killed. The constant unrest reduced the profits made by the plantation owners. Slave rebellions varied in size and most were put down with the help of forces from either the British Army or the Royal Navy.

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The beginning of chattel slavery in North America birthed something else: Rebellion. Enslaved people didn't just engage in passive resistance against slaveholders-they planned and participated in armed revolts. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, enslaved Africans and African Americans in British North America and the United States staged hundreds of revolts.

Fed by a longing for freedom and occasionally inspired by slave actions in other parts of the region- especially the Caribbean-slave uprisings in the United States were daring, desperate, and inevitably doomed. Along the way, the organizers and participants of the rebellions shattered stereotypes of compliant, contented slaves, and challenged the institution of slavery itself.

Revolts evolved alongside slavery. The first known slave rebellion in one of England's American colonies took place in Gloucester County, Virginia in 1663, 44 years after the first slaves arrived in the British colony. The Servants Plot, as it was known, involved white and black indentured servants who rebelled against the colony's exploitative tobacco cultivation industry. Their plot failed and at least four men were hanged.

The incident unsettled planters. At the time, the tobacco economy relied on white and black indentured servants with finite contracts and some rights under the law. The uprising convinced many to trade their reliance on indentured servants and embrace race-based slavery instead. Planters increasingly purchased and enslaved Africans who had been kidnapped and brought to America by Dutch and English slavers; unlike indentured servants, these laborers had no contracts and their bondage was passed on to their children. ( These were the first enslaved people to arrive in the American colonies in 1619.)

As more enslaved Africans arrived in American colonies, they continued to rebel. A 1712 slave rebellion in New York City killed at least nine white slave holders, while in 1739, up to 100 black people in colonial South Carolina participated in the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in British North America. The revolt resulted in some laws intended to discourage uprisings and rein in brutal slaveholders, but fomented fear of black rebellion. The colonies already had strict slave codes designed to govern the behavior of enslaved people. In response to the Stono Rebellion, laws became increasingly draconian.

Terrified of enslaved Africans, white slaveholders reduced their reliance on African-born slaves and stoked a growing trade in African American chattel. In all 14 slave states and the District of Columbia that were part of the newly born United States, laws restricted enslaved people's assembly, travel, worship, literacy and more. ( Watch divers uncover the history of slave shipwrecks.)

Many slave codes were based on similar laws in the Caribbean. Ironically, the 1791-1803 Haitian Revolution, a massive uprising in which enslaved and free black people joined together to overthrow French slaveholders on Saint-Domingue, inspired enslaved people in the United States to participate in the exact kind of resistance slave codes were designed to prevent. The uprising sowed a fear of insurrection in slaveholders, who passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required every state to return runaway slaves to slaveholders, in response to the revolution.

But that law did not keep enslaved laborers from running away-or fighting back against those who sold, purchased, and exploited them. In 1811, more than 500 enslaved people armed with knives, guns, and farm tools rebelled on Louisiana's German Coast. Fueled by the success of the Haitian Revolution, the highly organized group planned to establish an independent black state. They were felled by a local militia and U.S. troops, who brutally punished the fighters. The German Coast Uprising was the largest slave revolt in United States history.

The 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, organized by an enslaved preacher in Virginia, was the bloodiest to both white and black people. During a day-long rampage, Turner and his followers killed at least 55 white people. During the aftermath, at least 30 men were executed after trials before a panel of judges who were themselves slaveowners. White people attacked, tortured, and killed at least 36 more enslaved people they suspected of rebellion. Martial law was eventually declared and the uprising stoked even more fear and mistrust between white slaveholders and black people in bondage. ( Historians are still making new discoveries about the enslaved preacher and his rebels.)

As abolitionists challenged the institution of slavery from the North, enslaved people kept resisting in the South. In 1859, John Brown planned to arm up to 500 enslaved people after an attack on the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. Brown's plan did not succeed and he was executed along with several co-conspirators. Nonetheless, the revolt has been called "a dress rehearsal for the Civil War," and increasing tensions over slavery tipped the nation into chaos less than two years later.

"The revolts were all doomed from the start," writes historian Joseph E. Holloway, "and yet slaves still revolted against insurmountable odds in the fight for their personal freedom and liberty." Slave rebellions in British North America and the United States were all unsuccessful, but they underscored the cruelty of the institution-and fueled a sense of unease among those whose fortunes depended on the forced labor of others.

Significant slave rebellions in British North America and the United States include:

1663: Servants Plot, Gloucester County, Virginia (four or more executed)

1739: Stono Rebellion, Stono, South Carolina (44 executed)

1791: Haitian Revolution

1741: New York City Conspiracy (over 100 executed or otherwise punished)

1811: German Coast Uprising (at least 84 killed in battle or executed)

1822: Denmark Vesey's Revolt (35 executed)

1831: Nat Turner's Revolt (30 executed)

1859: Harper's Ferry Raid (five executed)

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How two centuries of slave revolts shaped American history

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The beginning of chattel slavery in North America birthed something else: Rebellion. Enslaved people didn't just engage in passive resistance against slaveholders-they planned and participated in armed revolts. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, enslaved Africans and African Americans in British North America and the United States staged hundreds of revolts.

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From Contingent mag

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Editor's note: This is the sixteenth entry in a series on how historians-especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia-do the work of history. It is also the first entry to profile the people behind Contingent Magazine (there will be more). If you know of someone we should interview for a future profile, or would like to be interviewed yourself, please send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Erin Bartram (@erin_bartram on Twitter) is a historian of women, gender, religion, and ideas in the 19th century U.S., and a founder and editor of Contingent. Here's how she does history.

When you are not doing work for Contingent, where else are you working? How long have you worked there and is this your first connection with the organization?

I am the School Programs Coordinator at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. I have worked there since May 2019. I started part-time and then went full-time in July 2020. My first time visiting the house was for my first on-site interview for the position. I'd never been on a field trip there like many other Connecticut and western Massachusetts students who grew up a bit closer to Hartford. In my previous position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford, I coordinated the internship program for history majors, so I'd interacted with one member of Twain staff who was coordinating interns on the museum side (a job that's now mine!)

[Also, I'm going to be weird and call it The Mark Twain House & Museum throughout because our style guide dictates the capitalization of the "The" and I'm too used to it at this point.]

Tell Contingent readers what a typical day/week of work at the Mark Twain House & Museum is like for you.

There's no such thing, really. I know that's a cop-out, but it's true. Pre-pandemic, at least part of my day would be spent giving educational programs on-site to visiting students, but even that can mean a lot of things. It might mean doing a program on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with high schoolers or helping co-teach a college course with a local professor or a hands-on house tour with second graders-maybe even with folks at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center which is on the other side of our lawn.

In the summer, a typical day means coordinating two weeks-long grant-funded programs with local students, one on creative writing, the other on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the history of white supremacy in the US, particularly Connecticut.

I'll also be prepping for the start of school in the fall, revising our program offerings, training staff, and coordinating the advertisement and booking of programs through community partners. Lately, Connecticut Summer at the Museum has me giving a lot of our special summer tour for young children, Growing Up in the Gilded Age. When we found out we were one of the museums that had received financial support to allow children in the state to visit for free, I adapted an existing school program into a family tour and (re)trained our guides so that we'd have more offerings for families with young children.

Along with all of that, I might be supervising high school, undergrad, or grad interns, on-site or virtually, who are working on assessment/evaluation projects, creating podcasts, or curating exhibit cases (with the help of our Director of Collections). I also help deliver our adult outreach programs, so I might be driving to a library to deliver one of those or setting up for a virtual program live from the house.

There are also a lot of meetings (I don't hate those as much as some people) and raucous staff lunches. One thing we think about is what modern inventions or experiences we'd like to introduce Sam to. Getting him a Baja Blast at the Taco Bell drive-in is currently my #1.

You have our attention: tell us, once it's safe to travel again, why we should visit the Mark Twain House & Museum. What should we check out and what do you find to be the most rewarding part of working there?

Aside from the house itself, which is beautiful in all seasons and endlessly intriguing to me (thanks to the great work of our curatorial and maintenance folks), the house is so much more than the public persona of "Mark Twain." It's really about the family, the people who worked for them, their neighbors and friends, and their lives and connections. While you might picture him as the white-haired, white-suited Voice of American Literature, the Sam Clemens that moved to Hartford was recently married to a much wealthier woman from an abolitionist family, a young father, and an up-and-coming writer.

I think what I find most rewarding about working here is the way Sam's own interests-in literally everything-allow us to explore so much of 19th and early 20th century history. In my academic career, I'd been fortunate enough to work in the Sedgwick family's papers, and someone in the 19th century joked that no Sedgwick could sit down at a table without writing a letter-and they talked about everything in those letters. Clemens was much the same way, and loved to play with language even more. This means it's really easy for me to find ways to design programs rooted in the K-12 curriculum using the family's experiences here.

There's also something about place-based education that's magical, whether you're 9 or 99. There's a passage from a letter Sam wrote to his best friend Joe Twichell, who was the minister at Asylum Hill Congregational Church down the street, that guides often quote on tours. I think about it a lot.

To us our house was not unsentient matter-it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome-& we could not enter it unmoved.

For me, that rings true, not just because I am sometimes hit with the fact that I work in Mark Twain's house (in his staff's bedrooms, actually), but also because of the relationships I have with my coworkers, even those that have moved on to other positions. They're still in the house too, because of the memories I have of them there. I won't say I struggled with loneliness in academia. It was more that I enjoyed collaboration in a way that there wasn't a place for in that world. I didn't realize it until I started working at Twain, but Contingent is an obvious example of that. This doesn't mean that everything I do at work is explicitly collaborative, but we're all working towards a common goal in a way that's just not the case in academic work.

What is something people don't know or understand about working at a historic house museum like the Mark Twain House & Museum?

There's no single "job" in a place like this. I see academic historians talking about sending "leftover" graduate students to work in historic house museums (HHMs), and public historians pushing back and saying they're not qualified, but the reality is that there are lots of HHM jobs that neither an advanced degree in public history or "academic" history alone qualifies you for. Without our development department (especially our grants manager), our CFO/COO, our collections department, and our security and maintenance people, we don't have a house to interpret.

Also, like all jobs, part of the job is to make it look easy. Our historic interpreters aren't giving you a canned script, though-every general tour you go on at the house will be different because each guide crafts their own tour, drawing on the research and expertise of their colleagues, and tweaks it as we learn new things.

Can you tell us about some of the projects and programs that you have worked on at the Mark Twain House & Museum?

I have revised and expanded the educational programs we offer on- and off-site, adding a hands-on tour for K-3 students, a revised program on Twain, racism, and white supremacy that's a good companion to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a new English language arts and visual arts program about how artists illustrate stories. With Katie Burton, my former counterpart at the Stowe Center, I created two new programs that the museums deliver collaboratively: Making an Impact, about race, social justice, and creative writing, and Nook Farm Neighbors, a hands-on material culture program.

When the pandemic hit, I worked to convert some of our existing programs so we could deliver them virtually, but I also created some new programs to take advantage of our incredible virtual tour.

I worked with Leslie Imse, a music teacher from a nearby high school, to pilot a new music education program called "Make Music With Mark Twain."

I have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Clemens' writing since joining the museum-we don't even have a definitive complete bibliography-so I have been looking for ways to bring some of his less-familiar works into the visitor experience. One way I've done that is through Sam's Shorts, a program where I periodically post a short selection from a letter, essay, speech, novel, or poem in the museum center as well as online and ask visitors to read it and share their thoughts. Then I summarize the responses, answer some visitor questions, and share some context to help folks understand the place of the piece in Clemens' personal and professional life and in the history of the period. It has been really fascinating to see what pieces people respond to, and each wrap-up post is a little research project for me-on the history of vaccines, political campaigns, incel culture, or fantasies of space travel.

Have you always been interested in history? If so, what's your earliest memory about a historical topic or event?

Ahahahahahahah NO.

I was not really a history kid. I did love reading my dad's Readers Digest books about historical disasters and topics like that, but I wasn't into history in the way lots of other eventual historians seem to have been. I never asked to be taken to Old Sturbridge Village; I much preferred the Peabody. I dressed up as Susan B. Anthony for a school project when I was nine (I DIDN'T KNOW!!) but that was a requirement. My earliest clear memory of a historical event was when some guy named Ollie North preempted all of my favorite PBS shows every afternoon and I was pissed.

Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate school experiences. Was history always your main area of study and what were your research interests in graduate school?

If I'd gone with the subject I was strongest in, and that I liked the most, I would have been a math major. But I have dyslexia, and it still causes me much more trouble with numbers, so I didn't go in that direction. Honestly, I had gotten a little more interested in history in high school so I went with that, though I have absolutely no memory of making that choice. Within a week of starting at the College of the Holy Cross, where I did my undergrad, I'd added a music major and that was my primary focus through college. The AAS seminar helped me figure out I wanted to do history in some capacity, and that I wanted to do US history (I'd previously been interested in early medieval), but that came too late for me to apply to any graduate programs.

Instead, I graduated and went back to the job I'd had in college, working at a rare bookstore one town over from where I grew up. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had, and it introduced me to so many fascinating people and topics.

Through a series of coincidences and connections, I secured a seasonal position at Governors Island National Monument, which was a brand new park at the time, and for six months I got to help research, write, and deliver the first tours of the island. When that position ended, I was unable to secure a full-time position, which led me back to grad school (I'll explain later). My boss from the bookstore had met an author who was looking for someone to catalog their research papers for donation to an archive before they started their next book, and that's how I ended up working as an assistant to Nancy Milford. Readers may know her from her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, but I was sorting through the research she'd done in writing her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The conversations I had with Nancy over tea in her living room-about researching and writing, and more importantly about the value of researching and writing women's lives-impacted me more than I knew at the time.

When I applied to grad school, it was initially to get an MA in history so I'd have a better chance of getting back into the National Park Service. I applied to PhD programs which rightly rejected me because I didn't know what I wanted to do, but a good part of that was that I had sailed off the edge of the map in terms of what my family and friends knew about. But I knew I wanted to do microhistorical work in early America, and so the place I ended up getting accepted to do a funded MA was actually the best possible place for me: the University of Connecticut.

After my acceptance, my adviser asked me to call for a chat, and somehow didn't rescind my acceptance after that conversation. When I started grad school, I was about the only member of my cohort who wasn't there with the intention of going on for a PhD, and that basically flip-flopped in the first month of the semester. I applied for admission into the PhD program at UConn and that's where I completed my degree in U.S. History with Richard D. Brown as my adviser.

Not only was UConn really the best place for me, I was fortunate enough to have an adviser who was endlessly curious and didn't mind me roaming far afield. In a department with Dick Brown, Bob Gross, Chris Clark, Nina Dayton, Nancy Shoemaker, and Altina Waller-plus some Early America stars in other departments at the university-I could have only taken 18th and 19th century courses if I'd really wanted to. But I took all kinds of courses, and got really into histories and theories of colonialism. Oddly it was that stuff that led me into the topic I ended up researching.

Tell us about your dissertation, "Jane Minot Sedgwick II and the World of American Catholic Converts, 1820-1890." For starters, who was Jane Minot Sedgwick II?

Jane was the relative of more famous people you may have heard of-the granddaughter of Theodore Sedgwick, the niece of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the great-great-great-great-great aunt of Kyra Sedgwick-and so was just connected and moneyed enough to have some of her papers preserved but not important enough for anyone to have ever noticed her before. For the purposes of my work, she was the daughter of a prominent New England Unitarian family and she converted to Catholicism in the 1850s.

In some of my coursework on colonialism and borderlands, I developed an interest in theories of identity, and in others, I'd noticed that 19th century US historiography argued that men and women had distinctly different social experiences. Why, then, were all of the major studies of converts to Catholicism in 19th century America-a period of significant anti-Catholicism-about men? I went into the project trying to answer the questions a) was the experience of conversion different? and b) how was it different? To answer those questions, I had to find someone to study. But I wasn't just interested in finding out why someone converted, in part because I believed that focus on the conversion had caused many scholars to narrow their analysis too much, lending an air of inevitability to the pre-conversion life and then seeing little of interest in the post-conversion life. I wanted to study a whole life to understand the place conversion had in it, but I didn't want to read meanings into that conversion that weren't there. That meant, for me, finding someone with a rich set of papers, someone I could know as a person, not just a convert.

How did I do that? I went to the database of some big archives in New England and put in "Catholicism." Unsurprisingly, there weren't many hits for the period in question. But Jane came up in the Massachusetts Historical Society's database, and within one visit, I had not only found the convert I was going to study, I had discovered a network of convert friends and a huge collection of papers from the broader Sedgwick family that would end up being vital to the work I was doing.

One common response to my research project was "Were there any converts to Catholicism?" That alone was reason to tackle it, because finding Jane was like pulling at a loose thread; the more I pulled, the more I found, in every prominent family and plenty of obscure ones. Some of these women had been examined before by scholars, but most scholars had stopped their analysis with the moment of conversion, suggesting the conversion was just a puzzle to be solved, and some had barely bothered to research these women before pronouncing that they'd undoubtedly been lured in by a priest or won over by "smells and bells." Instead, I centered the role of women in the conversion process, drawing on histories of friendship in the antebellum period. I was able to trace relationships that led to conversion and fostered deeper religious and social connections over years and across continents.

Ultimately, the project was as much about unpacking the way latent anti-Catholicism and misogyny continued to shape historiography on women and religion in 19th century America as it was about the religious lives of the women I studied. Essentially, both the existing literature and the reactions of many historians to my project suggests Catholic conversion in the US (and to an extent the UK) is intriguing only inasmuch as it is seen as an irrational choice, which helps explain why the literature and many scholars in real life conversations with me have been less interested in probing why women became Catholic-women are also seen as irrational, and so it's been more fascinating to puzzle over why rational men-voters, even!-would make such an irrational and dangerous choice. In my own dissertation defense, a colleague asked whether I'd considered the possibility that Jane-who made a difficult choice after ten years of consideration and lived a rich life after her conversion-had just converted because she was unmarried and lonely.

You're a historian of 19th century America, women, and religion. For those interested in those fields and wanting to learn more about them, what are some helpful works or resources? Who are some scholars that have inspired you?

I'm going to treat this like an awards speech and pack a bunch of names in. Scholars who've inspired me: Ann Laura Stoler, Jenny Franchot, Catherine O'Donnell, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Sharon Block, David O'Brien, Mary Kelley, Dallett Hemphill. Contemporaries who've inspired me: Monica Mercado, Bill Cossen, Pete Cajka, Catherine Osbourne, Megan Goodwin. And some good books to read:

While you were teaching and completing your dissertation, you also helped establish UConn's Graduate Employee Union (GEU-UAW Local 6950). Tell us about the process of organizing a union and why graduate students need a union.

Participating in the formation of GEU-UAW was the best thing I did in grad school, and I include my dissertation in that.

UConn grad students had attempted to unionize in years prior, but some significant structural changes in 2013-14 really allowed it to "take" that time. The most important one, and the one that galvanized grad students across the university, was changes to our health insurance. When I started at UConn, we were on the same health insurance as the faculty. But apparently the university had set a deadline to move us to another plan and whether they intended to make this choice or they just put it off and screwed it up, grad students ended up on the plan for undergraduates. This meant the only place you could receive affordable care was at student health services on campus, and it was limited to the care they provided there at the times they provided it. This was, as should be obvious, absolutely unworkable for an adult population with children.

Health care is what lit the fire, and the early organizing committee's choice to align with the UAW came at another fortuitous moment-just after they'd managed to force NYU to recognize the grad student union there after a multi-year struggle. But as we started doing the work to organize in preparation for a card drive, what emerged was a panoply of everyday slights and outright abuses. It was nice, in a weird way, to realize that yours wasn't the only department where someone just "forgot" to put grad payroll information in and no one was getting paid till October or November. But we also found real disparities between departments and fields, and specific issues that needed to be addressed as well-whistleblower protection in a department where a professor had a long history of inappropriate behavior, and the lack of women's bathrooms in another department's building.

Cards dropped on Valentine's Day 2014, and our union was certified by the state in April. That's really fast for something like this. We spent the next year bargaining a contract, and ratified it in April/May 2015-just as my funding ended and I left UConn. I never got to sign my union card there, but I am incredibly proud that I got to spend my last two years at that school with such an amazing group of people doing important work.

One of the things our UAW folks reminded us of all the time was that the university could say it didn't have the money, but a union was a way to make them open up the books and prove it. Getting the contract was a huge victory, but enforcing it was ongoing work. Turns out, though, they could get grad pay out on time! How about that?

This all being said, the non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty organized when I was in my position at the University of Hartford, and I saw the difference in organizing at a public institution vs. a private institution. Just as with UConn, I never actually got to sign my union card there either. But that was because UHart was able to drag the process out from the beginning, and was much more heavy-handed than UConn. When we as grad students got all of the state's (Democratic) leadership and much of the assembly on our side, it made it much harder for the university to dig in. At UHart, we didn't have any of that support. I was a VAP at the time, and at first the university tried to say people in my position weren't in the bargaining unit, and then they "accidentally" sent my ballot to my parents' address. As a result, I spent the afternoon of December 23 running down Main St. in Hartford in the snow to the Ribicoff building to get my replacement ballot in on time.

Grad students and adjuncts and faculty need unions because there is power in a union. Without collective bargaining, or in places where that's not legal, collective action, you will get trampled over. And given that trampling over grads and adjuncts is basically the business model of the modern university, I'd argue there's no substitute for this work. It's not only scary to try to fight these battles on your own, it's ultimately useless. It's disheartening how few faculty who claim to be activists seem to have processed and deployed the fundamental mechanisms of building power in their own work lives.

Before Contingent was even Contingent, when it was a Google Doc called "Untitled Project Brainstorm," what were your hopes for it? What do you want or would like its future to look like?

It was a hard time, honestly. I was recently out of academia, unemployed but for one adjunct class in the fall of 2018, and feeling pretty bleak about my own future. I don't know that I remember what I hoped for it. I do know that while I knew how much money we were looking to raise to get the magazine off the ground, I never really allowed myself to think about how much money it would take to run it. There was a moment where we had to take a leap and say "we're doing this, and if it doesn't take off, the three of us are going to have to come up with several thousand dollars each to pay the people whose work we've already contracted." And then there was the equally-terrifying moment when we realized people had donated and we were going to have to actually do this.

Honestly, I don't really want the magazine to put out more pieces than it does. That's not the growth I'm looking for. I think there's already too much to absorb. What I'd like to do is a) raise pay and b) provide space for increasingly innovative and creative ways of doing history. These were in our "blue sky" document from the first year of publication, and we've done both of them already, but I want to do more.

Now three years into its existence, what are the best but also the hardest parts about editing Contingent?

Balancing keeping the mission going as originally constituted and expanding. My co-editors are infinitely patient with my many whims and what-ifs, because we all have them. It's also challenging that we all have very different work lives than we did when we started.

One thing that has been more challenging than I expected is getting adjuncts-proper adjuncts-to pitch us. We get a lot from grad students, and full-time NTT scholars, and even those who've left academia. But active adjuncts? Those scholars who are teaching at three different schools to stitch together a life? We get fewer pitches from them than I'd prefer. If you're a secure scholar whose department employs adjuncts, let them know there's a place that will pay them for their writing.

In 2018 your essay "The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind" went viral and initiated countless discussions about the academic job market. Now, three years since it debuted, what do you think the legacy of the piece is?

At the time, it was giving people permission to feel the complex feelings they had about academia. I had people tell me it helped them grapple with a loss they'd ignored for a decade. But it also meant that I've struggled to get out from under the weight of being known for a piece of highly emotional writing. In the immediate aftermath, there was the suggestion that my piece had done harm because I didn't understand the labor politics of academia. A lot of false consciousness stuff, often very gendered, based on the assumption that I had never thought critically, let alone done any work, in this area.

As for the legacy, one thing I've noticed is the way that subsequent pieces of quit lit have been more highly praised by tenure-track scholars if they were less emotional-particularly when the author identified as a woman and when the emotions minimized were grief and anger. I see stuff like "It's so nice to read something calm and rational, not full of anger and blame." That really chaps my hide.

The other legacy is that I've gotten more citations in peer-reviewed pieces out of this piece of writing than anything else I've ever done. In many cases, that's tenured or tenure-track folks using my writing-my experiences-to further their careers. It's very odd to see yourself become a primary source, especially when you're treated as functionally dead in the process. [Sometimes I can still hear his voice meme] But that happened very quickly, with lots of people assuming lots of things about me, my social location, and my emotional state. It was kind of funny to experience it as a historian, and made me think about how badly I might have read the sources I used. That being said, I did far more research before making any argument about Jane than people on the internet-and even scholars writing books-have done before making arguments about me.

If you were speaking to undergraduate history majors who were thinking of going to graduate school or an introduction to historical thinking and methods seminar of first-year history grad students, and they asked for your advice on how to be a historian, what would you tell them?

My go-to advice was always that you need to find a way to go from being a fan of the team to a fan of the game. When I started following baseball as a kid, I only watched or listened to games where my team was playing. And that's a perfectly fine thing to do-to cultivate deep knowledge of a set of players so that you can watch 162+ games and really understand what you're seeing. But eventually I became a fan of the game, someone who could watch any pair of teams playing and find it interesting and enjoyable. I think to really be a historian, you have to become a fan of the game. That means being able to find something interesting to think about in any part of the past you encounter. It doesn't matter how much deep knowledge you accumulate about 12th century German monasticism or battles of the US Civil War, if that's the only kind of history you can find interesting, I think you're missing a lot of what it means to be a historian.

You're known for your advocacy of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty. For those wanting to help or do more for contingent scholars, what do you recommend?

I don't blame you for asking this question, but it does feel a bit like when someone in higher ed asks me how I think we should fix academia-I don't know that I have great ideas and I know that many of the people I'm addressing will disagree with (or at least slither away from) my suggestions. But I'll give it a try.

Be honest about the ways that your job security often depends on the precarious employment and poor pay of adjuncts (and grad students). Think about how that shapes how you engage with this issue. Does it make you defensive? Do you find yourself making excuses for their working conditions because changing them would mean more work, fewer resources, or just general discomfort for you?

Stop saying you've tried helping if you've never done something that made you uncomfortable, if you've never used the privilege of your security to do something-even collectively-that would make the provost upset.

Organize. For some of you this means being active in an existing union, for some it means unionizing, and for others it means finding ways to organize that aren't unions.

You can always just give money to them. That works too.

When you are not editing pieces for Contingent or working at the Mark Twain House & Museum, you also sing. Tell us about performing in a choral music ensemble.

Until grad school, music was always a much bigger part of my life than history. Other than maybe one total calendar year, I've always been singing or playing music (I was an instrumentalist first). It was a lifesaver in grad school because it was something I got to do with others-that collaboration towards a single goal thing-and it was something I could finish. When you're doing your dissertation, you're never finished, but I could work on music for a period of time, perform it, and be done with it.

Voices of Concinnity, the group I perform with now, is one of four ensembles that make up Consonare Choral Community. It's a small professional chamber ensemble, meaning it's about 12 voices max and we sing stuff designed for a group of that size. Everything we sing is unaccompanied as well. In combination, those characteristics mean we're not performing the Verdi Requiem or Bach Mass in B Minor.

But lots of what we sing is by living composers. What makes Concinnity different from every other group I've sung with, though, is that our artistic director Sarah Kaufold consistently programs composers who aren't white men. It's almost impossible to describe to someone outside of choral music in the US just how relentlessly male and white that space is, but the best way I've come up with to describe it is that in the decade before I started singing with VoC, I'd sung more music by living composers named Eric than I had by women composers living or dead.

Sometimes just the women record and perform things too!

That recording of "TaReKiTa" came from February 2020, our last live indoor performance before the pandemic. So many aspects of our world have been gutted by COVID-19, but as a singer I really felt a line from Marta Olmos' piece in our History Now series: "Now my body is a weapon. Do I have it? Am I spreading it? I walk lightly through public spaces, covering my face to protect others from my presence. My work is too risky. My stories are non-essential." And I'm just someone who sings on the side. My friends who are professional musicians lost their livelihoods in the blink of an eye-especially the singers.

But we didn't give up. During the pandemic, we commissioned a piece about the experience of the initial lockdown and recorded it virtually. This summer we had the chance to sing that piece together live in a series of outdoor concerts throughout the state.

Rehearsing for this concert inside, once we were all vaccinated, was an absolute joy.

For the first time in 15 months, we sang together inside, in a beautiful acoustic, to prepare pieces for our upcoming live(!!) performances, "From Silence Into Song." https://t.co/GIZTQO0scc
It takes some getting used to, but it feels so good to be back. 🎶🎶#choirlife pic.twitter.com/e44U7ave8Z
- Voices of Concinnity (@ConcinnityCT) May 6, 2021

A year of singing virtually, then singing outside masked and distanced, then just singing outside strengthened us as singers and really showed us what we could do. Listen to the same song recorded inside a very resonant church and then outside in Sarah's backyard, masked and distanced. I am not lying when I tell you I could only really hear one other singer when we recorded the second version.

I was also able to combine two parts of my life when Concinnity recorded at the Twain House, performing a setting of the poem Sam Clemens chose for his daughter Susy's headstone.

A piece I think of as one of our signature tunes (because we've performed it so many times!) gets at some of why we do this.

In our lifetime, we will undoubtedly have so many questions left unanswered.
So many stories will be left untold.
Perhaps we may live an answer or illuminate a story.
Perhaps we may not.
So we turn to the security of constancy as dependable as the sea,
nature full of beauty and peace,
music that can teach and inspire.
Perhaps all we can do is seek comfort
in such things as flowers, and song, and you.

People think they know a lot about Erin Bartram. What's something people don't know or would be surprised to know about you?

I know how to score a baseball game by hand and used to do it a lot. I also review books for Publishers Weekly, a gig I got with the help of a wonderful person who works in the archives where I did a lot of my research. My reviews are anonymous, and I can't reveal the books I've reviewed, but let's just say I'm lucky to get a sneak preview of a lot of the great scholarship on religion that's being produced these days.

If you weren't a historian, what kind of work do you think you'd be doing?

I suppose from one perspective, we know what kind of work I'd be doing because I'm doing it. I'm not a historian in the way many use that term. As an editor and someone who develops and delivers educational programming for children and adults, I do lots of the work of history every day. I couldn't do either job without the skills and knowledge I gained in academic history. And I produce historical knowledge as well, especially in my work at the museum. But I don't do it in the way academic historians recognize-as an individual, under my own name, after being reviewed by my peers-in either of my positions.

That being said, I'm also not considered a historian in my position at the museum by those in the museum world, at least so far as knowledge production is concerned. As a general rule, there are people within museums that are expected to write articles, and those people are curators, not school programs coordinators. Even if I wanted to write a conference paper or article or a book about anything Twain, there's really no space or support in my position to do that. That's not the fault of my museum, it's just not what my job is. In that sense, I really am finding another use for the history PhD-I need it to do my job, but I am not doing the primary thing it purportedly trains you to do.

If I weren't doing what I'm doing now, though, I'm not sure what else I'd do. Having worked in academia doesn't make you "qualified" for lots of things, but it doesn't make you as unqualified as lots of people think. The PhD is a bit of a millstone because of what it represents to people who want to hire you, but I know I'm perfectly capable of doing lots of things well and finding fulfillment in them. I had other jobs before grad school and I've managed to make my way out of academia okay, though it was rough at times. I think it's important for people following that path to know the difference between what they're capable of doing and what the hiring world thinks they're capable of doing, because your inability to persuade people to hire you can pretty quickly erode your general sense of usefulness.

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Editor's note: This is the sixteenth entry in a series on how historians-especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia-do the work of history. It is also the first entry to profile the people behind Contingent Magazine (there will be more).

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Marcus Rediker: How to write history from below (graduate)

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Marcus Rediker: How to write history from below (graduate)

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By Marcus Rediker at the University of Pittsburgh

"History from Below" - also called "Peoples' History" and "Radical History" - has been an important part of the appearance and spectacular growth of social history over the past half century and one of the most important developments in the discipline and profession of history. This course is designed to introduce graduate students in a broad variety of disciplines, departments, and programs to the key theories, methods, and issues in history from below, from its origin in the 1930s, through the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, to the present. The course will concentrate on four major themes: race, class, gender, and capitalism. We will read classic and newer works to demonstrate how historical practice has changed over time. Special emphasis will also be given to sources, especially archival research, and to writing.

I have taught this course twice, at the University of Hawai'i-Manoā (spring 2019) and the University of Pittsburgh (spring 2020). The books and articles I use change over time. Here are those I have used so far:

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Harvard University Press, 1983.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2015.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004.

Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Eduardo Galeano, Genesis: Memory of Fire, Volume I, W.W. Norton, 1998.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, Penguin, 1972.

C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage, 1938.

Gerda Lerner, "Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges," Feminist Studies 3(1975), 5-14.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Beacon Press, 2004.

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

George Rawick, "Working-Class Self-Activity," Radical America, 3(1969), 23-31. Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/rawick/1969/xx/self.html

Marcus Rediker, "The Poetics of History from Below," American Historical Association Perspectives, September 2010. Available online at : https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2010/the-poetics-of-history-from-below

Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, Penguin, 2012.

Gregory Rosenthal, Beyond Hawai'i: Native Labor in the Pacific World, University of California Press, 2018.

Raphael Samuel, "Peoples' History" and "History and Theory," in Raphael Samuel, ed., Peoples History and Socialist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, 1988.

Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, Verso Books, 2018.

Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920, University of Hawai'i Press, 1984.

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, 1963.

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger, Doubleday, 1992.

Jonathan M. Wiener, "Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980," Journal of American History 76(1989), 399-434.

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How to Write History from Below (Graduate)

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"History from Below" - also called "Peoples' History" and "Radical History" - has been an important part of the appearance and spectacular growth of social history over the past half century and one of the most important developments in the discipline and profession of history.

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Steven Hahn

Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world.

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
Julius S. Scott
Verso, $24.95 (paper)

Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
Belknap Press, 2020, $35 (cloth)

The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution
Niklas Frykman
University of California Press, $32.95 (cloth)

The Age of Revolution (1770-1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; its political energy fed off the struggles between the bourgeois and their aristocratic enemies. Although visionary hopes could meet crushing defeats-as they did during the popular risings of 1848-by the end, there were new parliamentary regimes, emerging nation-states, declarations of rights, and the eruption of an industrial age.

Until recently, Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally, enslaved people didn't fit the image of political actors.

And yet, this classic narrative leaves out the most radical of the revolutions that exploded neither in continental Europe nor in North or South America, but in the Caribbean, on the island the French called Saint-Domingue and the victorious rebels would call Haiti (Ayiti), after its indigenous name.

Until recently, the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally important, enslaved people didn't fit an accepted image of political actors, and thus it was difficult for historians to see them standing alongside the signers of the Declaration of Independence in America, the Jacobins in France, the Bolivareans in Gran Colombia, the Mazzinians in Italy, or the Chartists in England: envisioning, allying, struggling, surmounting. This, despite such works as C.L.R. James's Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, which left little doubt about the political capacities of enslaved Blacks.

Nowadays, Eurocentrism is called out for its parochialism as well as its veiled racism. Historians are much more attentive to questions of empire and colonialism, so they place the events of the Age of Revolution in a much broader context. Circum-Atlantic and transnational histories abound and have exerted enormous influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies. The Haitian Revolution has itself been the subject of a rapidly growing scholarship, whether looking from the Caribbean out or from the Euro-Atlantic in. And there has been renewed interest in slave systems, the maritime world, and their relation to the development of capitalism.

Still, it is not entirely clear how the pieces of this newly expansive story come together: how we may reimagine and reconceptualize what the Age of Revolution would look like if viewed comprehensively from below and from above, if portrayed with a much larger array of political actors and a much greater sense of the scope and ambitions of international as well as local politics. And if understood as coinciding with-indeed, deeply interconnected to-an age of emancipation in which the most powerful slave regimes in the world were overthrown despite hesitation among Euro-American revolutionaries themselves. The three outstanding volumes under review here offer the materials for just such a reconsideration.
* * *
The Common Wind (its title taken from William Wordsworth's ode to Toussaint Louverture) is a pioneering contribution to our understanding of the place of Haiti in the Age of Revolutions. A revised version of Julius Scott's 1986 doctoral dissertation (its publication delayed by unexpected circumstances and a determination to get the story right), the book is less about the Haitian Revolution per se than about the circulation of ideas and experiences that both lit the fuse and then sent the explosive results across an immense space. Indeed, Scott's is a multinational history that suggests how the revolutionary years from 1780 to 1815 might appear if Saint-Domingue and then Haiti were recognized as a hub around which the politics of the period radiated.

The radicalism of the Age of Revolution was invigorated as it moved from France to Saint-Domingue and then to Jamaica, Cuba, and back. The visions of the Jacobin Republic in France and of the slave rebellion turning revolution in Saint-Domingue were both mutually constitutive and ever expanding.

Arguing that the commodity-producing slaveocracies of the Caribbean were major sites of trade and migration, Scott draws our attention to the ports rather than the plantations, to the seas rather than the land, and to the "masterless"-sailors, free people of color, runaways, maroons-as much as to the enslaved. They are the keys to understanding how news, rumors, information, and ideas flowed across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean: the ever-thickening veins of commerce that linked Nantes and Bordeaux to Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), Port-au-Prince, Havana, and Kingston. These trade routes brought thousands of vessels and maritime laborers into the harbors of all of these cities; they also brought fugitives and veterans of battle. Two of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue's rebel leaders (Makandal and Boukman) fled there from Jamaica. Henri-Christophe, another leader, was born in St. Kitts. He, Andres Rigaud, and Martial Besse, free men of color who became military leaders, served with the French forces at Savannah during the American Revolution.

As a result, the enslaved and the free people of color in any one place learned of history's unfolding elsewhere and transformed the languages of revolution that they heard-and, in some cases, read-into their own political vernacular. The radicalism of the Age of Revolution, as Scott so brilliantly shows, was invigorated as it moved from France to Saint-Domingue and then to Jamaica, Cuba, and back. The visions of the Jacobin Republic in France and of the slave rebellion turning revolution in Saint-Domingue were both mutually constitutive and ever expanding.

Like a stone that falls into the water, the rebellion in Saint-Domingue, as Scott demonstrates, had ripple effects going in multiple directions: to other Caribbean islands, to the South American mainland, and, perhaps with greatest effect, to the United States. Beginning in 1793, thousands of slaveholding emigres, their slaves often in tow, headed out of Saint-Domingue to whatever port might offer a measure of safety. Well over 10,000 landed along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America, settling in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Mobile, and especially New Orleans. With them came vital news of rebellion in Saint-Domingue that sent fear through the minds of American slaveholders and hope through the minds of their slaves, who quickly learned that the wealthiest and most powerful slave regime in the world had fallen before the might of their enslaved counterparts.

The consequences would be enormous for the social and political history of the Western Hemisphere and Euro-Atlantic and particularly for what was about to become the new center of the slaveholders' world: the U.S. South. The rumblings from below were already apparent in the 1790s with slave conspiracies in Louisiana, and then, in the early nineteenth century, with the aborted Gabriel's Uprising of 1800, the St. John the Baptist Parish revolt of 1811 in Louisiana, and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 in Charleston, all of which showed either the direct influence of the emigres or secondhand knowledge of what had transpired in Saint-Domingue. As the cotton economy spread across the Deep South, the enslaved laborers who were driven along with it could now know that slave systems were not cast in stone and timeless, that they were vulnerable and could be destroyed by people like them. As we have come to realize, owing to Scott's groundbreaking work, there is no way of understanding the history of the United States during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, and especially the emancipation process during the Civil War, without acknowledging the political shadow cast by the Haitian Revolution and the political roles played by previously unrecognized actors: the masterless of the Atlantic and the enslaved workers their enslavers thought they had mastered.
* * *
During the Haitian Revolution, the rebel armies under the command of Toussaint Louverture not only toppled the slaveholding class of Saint-Domingue; they also defeated the armies of Britain, Spain, and France to secure their victory, freedom, and eventual independence as the Republic of Haiti. Slave rebellions, together with the quotidian struggles in which enslaved people engaged, were nothing less than warfare. And although this might seem apparent on considered reflection, few scholars have taken to the idea and its meaning for the study of slave regimes. Vincent Brown is a notable exception. Slave warfare is one of the central conceptual points in Brown's extraordinary book on Tacky's revolt, the massive Jamaican slave rebellion of 1760-61. Indeed, Brown sees the rebellion as more than an episode of Jamaican history and internal warfare; he sees it as part of a multilayered set of wars that encompassed both sides of the Atlantic and involved empires in Africa and Europe. Combining meticulous research in a multitude of national archives and the use of new technologies for visualization, Brown has produced one of the best treatments of slavery ever written.

The rebellion in Jamaica was very much an extension of wars erupting in the West African interior, propelled in many cases by the demands of European trade, and involving Africans who went into battle in both places.

Enslavement, Brown reminds us, did not simply begin in West Africa and get redeployed in the Western Hemisphere. As a system it was in constant motion, embracing people and states on several continents, trade and commercial relations crisscrossing the Atlantic, and-notably in the eighteenth century-almost continuous warfare as well as brutal regimes of exploitation. Owing to Brown's success at identifying many of the enslaved participants in the events he recounts, we are able to see how the rebellion in Jamaica was very much an extension of wars erupting in the West African interior, propelled in many cases by the demands of European trade, and involving Africans who went into battle in both places.

Jamaica was Britain's most lucrative colony and its most formidable military base, a virtual "garrison government" devoted to keeping enslaved laborers in subjection, fierce maroons (fugitive slave communities) in check, and rival empires at bay. The sugar plantations, where half of the enslaved Africans toiled, often took on the appearance-in their architecture and placement-of fortifications, and the work regimens on them showed military-like cadences. Between a half and three-quarters of Jamaica's slaves in the mid-eighteenth century were African born, often veterans of West African wars, and thus quite aware of the broad context in which their enslavement occurred. Many of them had been forced aboard slave ships along the Gold Coast and became known as Coromantees (perhaps from the English post at Cormantyn), though they had generally been taken captive much farther inland and belonged to a number of different ethnic and linguistic groups. The Coromantees had reputations for their strength, skills, discipline, and rebelliousness: they were simultaneously prized and feared by their enslavers.

With attentiveness to the multiple sources and contending narratives, Brown demonstrates that what the British would call "Tacky's revolt" was only part-a small and abbreviated part-of a larger "Coromantee war" that engulfed Jamaica for months. Although it is difficult to uncover the scope, timing, and objectives of the plot, Tacky and fellow slaves from the Gold Coast rose in St. Mary's Parish in early April 1760 and seemed most intent on wresting control of the nearby riverine commercial zones and Fort Haldane from which weapons could be taken (the book's wonderfully detailed maps help us visualize the revolt's course). Early success came undone in the face of the British militia and of the maroons who had signed a treaty with the British long before and were ready to fulfill their end of the bargain: secure slavery in return for their independence and autonomy. There were, that is, political fissures of great consequence within the African-descended population. Tacky, it appears, was killed by one of the maroon's bullets, and his revolt collapsed in short order.

But this was by no means the end. There is some indication that Tacky and his followers-nearly half of whom may have been women-rose too early; that they were to have awaited the arrival of the Whitsun holidays some weeks later to coordinate island-wide. British colonial officials and the slaveholders took no chances; they stretched the trials and executions of the captured rebels out over several weeks to gain more information and set terrifying examples of punishments. It didn't work. In late May another rising occurred in Westmoreland Parish, the heart of the sugar plantocracy, led in this case by Wager (his African name, Apongo), whose trans-Atlantic story Brown reveals in all its complexity and with imaginative guesswork. The Westmoreland rising did not collapse in short order, even when the British navy became involved (thus linking the Jamaican rising with the Seven Years War) or when Wager was captured and gruesomely executed that summer. Rebel bands continued their struggle into the following year, relying on tactics of guerilla warfare, before some semblance of order was restored. Altogether, the Coromantee war would rank as the largest slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere before the Haitian Revolution. It formed a great peak in what Brown terms an "archipelago" of warfare that stretched from the Gold Coast of West Africa through the plantation zones of Jamaica, "at once an extension of the African conflicts that fed the slave trade, a race war among black slaves and white slaveholders, an imperial conquest, and an internal struggle between black people for control of territory and the establishment of a political legacy."
* * *
The tsunamis of revolt and revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century were just that, because the seas were integral to the making and meaning of these convulsive events. The rebels in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue had made many journeys across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean. Their perspectives as to what was possible and how to struggle were informed by their fellow seafarers as well as by the masterless souls who manned the vessels of commerce and warfare and brought news-often embellished with their own interpretations-of political developments in London and Paris, along the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin, and in the ports of Barbados, St. Croix, Cuba, Demerara, and Berbice. And, as Niklas Frykman demonstrates in The Bloody Flag, the crews of the warships of Britain, France, and the Netherlands not only carried stories of multiple rebellions; they engaged in rebellion themselves and thereby expanded the dimensions of a revolutionary age.

In 1797 alone, the British navy experienced mutinies on more than a hundred ships involving 40,000 men, likely the "largest, best organized, and most sustained working-class offensive in eighteenth-century Britain." Some, echoing the political aspirations of the age, proclaimed a "floating republic."

The naval fleets of the eighteenth century may seem to pale in comparison to our own world of destroyers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, but the line-of-battle ships were easily the most powerful weapons of war during that time. They were also enormous sites of social hierarchy and labor exploitation. Building on the foundational studies of Marcus Rediker, Frykman reveals the many ways in which naval vessels were historical bridges between the plantation and the factory: in the hundreds of seamen (in some cases nearing a thousand) who labored in twenty-four-hour cycles; in the national, ethnic, and sometimes racial diversity to be found among them; in the brutal regimens and dangers of the work (a "barbaric industry"); in the surveillance to which the crews were subjected and the almost unlimited power of the ships' officers; in the punishments that were meted out to those who defied the rules (chiefly flogging but also execution); in the form of resistance most common (running away); in the coercive practices (particularly impressment) that could be used to assemble an adequate crew; and in the demands for better and more equitable pay and treatment that could be raised. The term "strike" is of maritime origin. If nothing else, Frykman's is a significant contribution to Atlantic labor history.

But much more is offered up. The distinction between a strike and a mutiny may be hazy and potentially shifting, as is true for all types of rebellion. Either form of protest could involve a few seamen or a great many, and could occur in a variety of circumstances and times. The 1790s, however, proved to be an especially turbulent era on the seas as it was on the land. There were, according to Frykman, more than 150 single-ship mutinies together with a half dozen fleet mutinies over the course of the decade; in 1797 alone, the British navy experienced mutinies on more than a hundred of the ships in its fleet involving an astonishing 40,000 men, likely the "largest, best organized, and most sustained working-class offensive in eighteenth century Britain." Some, echoing the political aspirations of the age, proclaimed a "floating republic."

Frykman's is very much an account of class formation and political radicalization. And he recognizes them as closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, he is attentive to the different national experiences to be found as to the makeup of the crews, the means of recruitment, the relationship between maritime and terrestrial (mostly urban) labor, and participation in the warfare of the 1790s. On the other hand, he demonstrates how a shared consciousness, international in its horizons and reflective of the revolutionary struggles in the Atlantic, developed and made itself felt: revolutionary maritime republicanism, Frykman suggests we term it.

By the early 1800s, the authoritarian paternalism that had long shaped relations between officers and seamen had given way to a new arena of struggle organized around class warfare, though one that never fully displaced the political allegiances of warfare between nations. It was "a deepening division of shipboard society into two sharply defined and opposing classes that found its most striking expression in the adoption of the red flag"-the bloody flag-"as a symbol of permanent struggle between them," accelerated by global conflict and the intense solidarities fostered by maritime labor. Although the mutinous explosions of the 1790s would be quelled by iron fists of suppression, the fortitude of the crews and the coercive practices that they endured led to anti-impressment campaigns in the new United States, which played an important role in articulating the substance of American independence, as well as in Britain. Leaders of the British anti-impressment campaign, such as Granville Sharp, were already deeply involved in the abolition movement, suggesting how the seaborne struggles of the 1790s contributed both to the age of emancipation and the making of national and international working classes. Small wonder that class-conscious sailors would later rear their heads, to great effect, at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, and Kiel, influencing the course of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the German Imperial state.
* * *

In Jamaica as in revolutionary Saint-Domingue and on the mutinous high seas, we may glimpse a confluence of political dispositions that have been inadequately recognized, including early forms of pan-Africanism and working-class internationalism.

How may these works, distinctive in their own ways, together contribute to new perspectives on this revolutionary age? The Coromantee wars of 1760-61 fall outside the customary chronological markers, yet Vincent Brown suggests how we can rethink the placement of those markers as well as the political currents of the Age of Revolution itself. The wars, Brown writes, "represented a watershed in the course of Atlantic history. Regional political maps had been drawn by the wars that opened new territories for cultivation, stimulated the slave trade, and enhanced state power-but the slave rebellions etched another record of historical movement. They channeled people into new solidarities and gave meaning to categories of belonging, partitioned friends and foes from bystanders, and redirected the priorities of governing authorities." Not only the eventual leaders of the Haitian Revolution but many of the enslaved outcasts of the Coromantee wars ended up in Saint-Domingue, while the wars became part of the political memory and "radical pedagogy" on Jamaican plantations. These undoubtedly fed subsequent conspiracies there as early as 1776, then the Second Maroon War of 1795-96, and ultimately the great Baptist War of 1831-32, involving as many as 60,000 slaves, which led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Slave warfare, that is, particularly in its large-scale and organized form, may have constructed the Age of Revolution's great political arc: beginning in the 1760s and ending in the 1860s, when the most powerful slaveholding class in the world was-as in Saint-Domingue-brought down during a massive war in which the enslaved proved to be fighters, liberators, and carriers of the historical sensibilities that -as Julius Scott demonstrates - grew out of the Haitian Revolution.

Yet an arc of revolution constructed by the struggles of the enslaved also reveals the multiple political threads that composed it. "The Coromantee Wars," Brown argues, "don't fit neatly into the prevailing narrative of the rise and progress of liberal freedom"; as best as we know, "the Coromantees did not draw upon the Enlightenment ideas that animated British and French revolutionaries, nor did they create an internationally recognized state." Although "they undoubtedly wanted liberation from the slaveholders," it was "rarely as liberal subjects-that is, autonomous and self-determined individuals. Instead, they fought for the space to develop their own notions of belonging, status, and fairness beyond the masters' reach."

Indeed, in Jamaica as in revolutionary Saint-Domingue and on the mutinous high seas, we may glimpse a confluence of political dispositions, energized and transfigured, that have been inadequately recognized-ethnic-based identities and hierarchies, slave royalism, radical republicanism, peasant consciousness, early forms of pan-Africanism, and working-class internationalism-and that help us sketch new connections between the Age of Revolution's first (1760-1804) and last phase (1848-67), and between the Age of Revolution and the socialist and communist revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Much, of course, is left to be done. But the work of Scott, Brown, and Frykman shows some of the new possibilities and potential rewards of viewing the Age of Revolution from below as well as from above.

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slave rebellions and mutinies shaped the age of revolution

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Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution

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Steven Hahn Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution Julius S.

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Harry T. Burleigh

From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance

Reclaiming the unique life and soaring art of an essential American composer

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time.

Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with Antonín Dvořák, Marian Anderson, and Will Marion Cook. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.

Drawing on exhaustive research into archives and family histories, Harry T. Burleigh reclaims the life and art of an essential American composer.

"The definitive biography of Burleigh. . . . worth reading for anyone interested in the cultural life of African American communities in the "Promised Land" after the Civil War. . . . a worthy addition to any library, personal or institutional, that collects information about black music and important figures in African American history."-- Black Grooves

"Dr. Snyder is a good storyteller. Her words flow easily across the page and assure the reader that a rewarding journey lies ahead. . . . Snyder is to be congratulated for her biography of "this grand old man," and her efforts demand the immediate attention of readers."-- The American Organist

"In addition to a detailed account of Burleigh's relationships with his contemporaries, his complex marital life, and his successful performing career, Snyder provides valuable musicological analysis of Burleigh's compositions and arrangements. Highly recommended."-- Choice

"Jean E. Snyder's brilliant encyclopedic evaluation of the life and legacy of Harry Thacker Burleigh reveals an intriguing lode of personal and professional detail about the iconic singer whose seminal influence in American compositional history is appreciated today by precious few."--George I. Shirley, Grammy Award winner and Director of the Vocal Arts Division, University of Michigan

"By incorporating the unique perspective offered by members of Harry T. Burleigh's family, Jean Snyder makes a valuable and much-needed contribution to the literature on one of the greatest African-American musical figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, Snyder's work is timely since it coincides with the Burleigh sesquicentennial celebration."--Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., author of The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States

"The definitive biography of Burleigh, unlikely to be superseded in the near future."--Thomas Riis, author of Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915

Publication of this book was supported by grants from the Lloyd Hibberd Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from the Henry and Edna Binkele Classical Music Fund.

Jean E. Snyder is an ethnomusicologist who has taught in Kenya and Zambia, and at several colleges and universities in Pennsylvania.

To order online:
//www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/45dsx4pf9780252039942.html

To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)

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erie; pennsylvania; hamilton waters; elizabeth waters; elizabeth waters burleigh; lizzie elmendorf; henry thacker burleigh; john elmendorf; baritone soloist; recitalist; art songs; american art song; negro spirituals; african american spirituals; plantation songs; charles avery; avery college;  national conservatory of music; jeannette thurber; antonin dvorak; new world symphony; symphony no. 9 in e minor; symphony from the new world; will marion cook; abbie mitchell; roland hayes; marian anderson; paul robeson; louise alston burleigh; princess nadonis shawa; william maxwell publishing company; ricordi music publishing company; john mccormack; alain locke; harlem renaissance;  carl van vechten; spiritual arrangements; james weldon johnson; j. rosamond johnson; chicago world's fair; 1893 columbian exposition; henry e. krehbiel; w. j. henderson; musical america; five songs of laurence hope; saracen songs; passionale; from the southland; southland sketches; langston hughes; a. walter kramer; hiram moderwell

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Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance

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From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance Reclaiming the unique life and soaring art of an essential American composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song.

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The Poetics of History from Below _ Perspectives on History _ AHA

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Did Music Create Human Rights_ - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

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Specifically themed on "History from Below."

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Marcus Rediker on the trade in enslaved peoples

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Marcus Rediker on the trade in enslaved peoples