The Many-Headed Hydra

A landmark in the development of an Atlantic perspective on early American history. Ranging from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean and North America, it makes us think in new ways about the role of working people in the making of the modern world. -- Eric Foner
This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried episodes and forgotten writings to recapture, with eloquence and literary flair, the lost history of resistance to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic. -- Howard Zinn
More than just a vivid illustration of the gains involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here, in incendiary form, are essential elements for a people's history of our dynamic, transcultural present. -- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic
The Many-Headed Hydra is a wonderful book. Its passion and commitment encourages its readers to think associatively, to make progressive connections -- Sukhdev Sandhu * Guardian *
Scum of the maritime sort had their spell in the limelight with The Many-Headed Hydra. This compellting history of the 'revolutionary Atlantic' portrays pirates, sailors, dockers, sea-going whores and other dregs of the ocean and coast as briny rebels who resisted the global commercial order and even disrupted the slave trade for decades. * Independent *
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, militantly libertarian academics, have written, in what they call this 'black book of capitalism', an account of trans-Atlantic social change since the seventeenth century, from the viewpoint of the underdog ... The authors' egalitarian bias may stimulate as much accumulation as Das Kapital. * Irish Times *