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5 - The radical underworld goes colonial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

James Epstein
James Epstein
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

“McCallum, P. F., hackwriter” is how he is indexed in Iain McCalman's classic Radical Underworld; he gets a brief mention in connection with Jonathan “Jew” King, blackmailer and radical, and the campaign against the Duke of York. Pierre Franc McCallum occupies the fringes of the history of British popular radicalism, as the sometime ally of and ghost-writer for Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, the Duke of York's former mistress whose revelations in 1809 about brokering the sale of commissions in the British army produced one of the century's most notorious scandals. Instead, however, of discussing McCallum's sorry career as a metropolitan journalist, scandalmonger, and blackmailer, this chapter turns to his role in a different underworld located in the British West Indies. In their book The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker chart networks, often hidden or unacknowledged, linking metropolitan radicalism to a wider, trans-Atlantic world of sailors, displaced workers, and slaves. Their work points to the important spatial dynamics of popular politics. For example, the life of the Jamaican-born person of color Robert Wedderburn – sailor turned tailor, “unrespectable” radical and underground revolutionary, millenarian prophet and evangelical preacher, anti-slavery activist, and occasional agent in the pornography trade – connected metropolitan plebeian radicalism to racial oppression in the Caribbean. The same was true of the activities of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, whose Irish background and years of service throughout the greater Caribbean culminated in his vision of human liberation, in pursuit of which he suffered a traitor's death and instantly entered radicalism's pantheon of martyrs.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scandal of Colonial Rule
Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution
 , pp. 156 - 183
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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