With an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization around the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, sailors, indentured servants, market women, prostitutes, and slaves came to inhabit European cities, American colonies and trade ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados.

Marshalling lost stories unearthed over a decade of original research, Linebaugh and Rediker show how this motley crew had their own versions of democracy. The rebellions they led were the result of unlikely and often multiracial collaborations. And although they were eventually suppressed, their ideas about liberty and freedom were used by the founders of modern revolutions.

Peter Linebaugh, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toledo, is author of The London Hanged, also published by Verso. Marcus Rediker, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and contributing author of Who Built America?

“The Many-Headed Hydra is a wonderful book. Its passion and commitment encourages its readers to think associatively, to make progressive connections.” — The Guardian

“This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture ... the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic.” — Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

“For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged.“… David Montgomery

Publication
Cloth: October 2000
Paper: May 2002

356 pages

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 233 1
£19 (UK only)

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 420 5
£12 (UK only)