Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- About the Editors
- Contributors' Notes
- “Introduction: Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa's Maritime History”
- “Austronesian Mariners and Early Trans-Indian Ocean Crossings”
- “Eight Hens per Man per Day: Shipwreck Survivors and Pastoral Abundance in Southern Africa”
- “State Control and Regulation of Commerce on the Waterways and Coast of Senegambia, ca. 1500-1800”
- “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora”
- “Rough Sailing: Risks and Opportunities for Immigrant African Maritime Workers in Gabon, ca. 1860-1914”
- “Desertion, Dereliction and Destitution: The Travails of Stranded West African Seamen in the United Kingdom, ca. 1921-1934”
- “‘The White Wife Problem:’ Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa”
- “Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors”
“Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors”
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- About the Editors
- Contributors' Notes
- “Introduction: Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa's Maritime History”
- “Austronesian Mariners and Early Trans-Indian Ocean Crossings”
- “Eight Hens per Man per Day: Shipwreck Survivors and Pastoral Abundance in Southern Africa”
- “State Control and Regulation of Commerce on the Waterways and Coast of Senegambia, ca. 1500-1800”
- “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora”
- “Rough Sailing: Risks and Opportunities for Immigrant African Maritime Workers in Gabon, ca. 1860-1914”
- “Desertion, Dereliction and Destitution: The Travails of Stranded West African Seamen in the United Kingdom, ca. 1921-1934”
- “‘The White Wife Problem:’ Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa”
- “Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors”
Summary
Over the past two decades many historians have examined the social lives of seafarers during the age of sail. Among the many insights they provide, three stand out: first, that the ship was an important site for the development and dissemination of anti-authoritarian ideals; second, that seamen were important carriers of revolutionary political consciousness to distant ports; and third, that the Atlantic basin, ceaselessly criss-crossed by marine commoners, was radicalized by this maritime traffic. In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue that:
Sailors were prime movers in the cycle of rebellion, especially in North America, where they helped to secure numerous victories for the movement against Great Britain between 1765 and 1776…Their militancy in port grew out of their daily work experience at sea, which combined coordinated cooperation with daring initiative. Sailors engaged on board ship in collective struggle over food, pay, work, and discipline, and they brought to the ports a militant attitude toward arbitrary and excessive authority, an empathy for the troubles of others, and a willingness to cooperate for the sake of selfdefense… Sailor s thus entered the 1760s armed with the traditions of hydrarchy. They would learn new tactics in the age of revolution, but so, too, would they contribute the vast amount they already knew.
They suggest further that seafarers embraced rebellious strategies because their experiences ashore and at sea were insufferable. On land, their rights were often restricted, their property expropriated and their labour exploited. At sea, many were press-ganged or shanghaied into service, others were bonded into debt-service agreements and all were subject to the capricious rule of an elitist officer class. But the “motley crews” that serviced capitalist expansion through seafaring found new opportunities to connect with each other as fellow subalterns, both on ships and on docks. “Sailors made the Atlantic a zone for the accumulation of capital, they began to join with others in faithfulness, or solidarity, producing a maritime radical tradition that also made it a zone of freedom. The ship thus became both an engine of capitalism in the wake of the bourgeois revolution in England and a setting of resistance.”
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- Navigating African Maritime History , pp. 189 - 213Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2009