Marcus Rediker on Writing

Marcus Rediker, as some of you may already know, is a talented writer and historian. He co-authored with Peter Linebaugh one of the first books I read in graduate school, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000). As a grad student in my first year, I was just learning about the “Atlantic World,” a concept that seems basic now, in hindsight, but was mind blowing back then - a good reminder that what’s “obvious” to me now as a teacher might be a game changer for some of my students.

The book argues that the laboring classes of the eighteenth century - soldiers, sailors, pirates, and even enslaved people, when afforded the opportunity - made alliances that cut across racial and imperial boundaries. The idea that pirates were consciously operating anti-capitalist flotillas in the early modern Atlantic, preying off the wealth of European empires and turning the world upside down along the way, might strike some as a bit too presentist. Were pirates then really the precursors to revolutionary communists and labor unions of the twentieth century?

What made the book so radical to me was the patchwork narrative structure, the way Rediker and co-author Peter Linebaugh weaved together different stories from different time periods, all connected by theme. Religious radicals, Africans, tavern owners, pirates, and soldiers jumped off every page, doing and saying things that seem radical even by today’s standards (like the Diggers, whose brand of antinomian Christianity led them to reject private land ownership as sinful). It made for heady reading when I was a younger and still impressionable grad student.

Recently Rediker offered some interesting writing advice on his Twitter feed, which you can find here.