Description:

This maritime history "from below" exposes the history-making power of common sailors, slaves, pirates, and other outlaws at sea in the era of the tall ship.

In Outlaws of the Atlantic, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker turns maritime history upside down. He explores the dramatic world of maritime adventure, not from the perspective of admirals, merchants, and nation-states but from the viewpoint of commoners—sailors, slaves, indentured servants, pirates, and other outlaws from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Bringing together their seafaring experiences for the first time, Outlaws of the Atlantic is an unexpected and compelling peoples’ history of the “age of sail.”

With his signature bottom-up approach and insight, Rediker reveals how the “motley”—that is, multiethnic—crews were a driving force behind the American Revolution; that pirates, enslaved Africans, and other outlaws worked together to subvert capitalism; and that, in the era of the tall ship, outlaws challenged authority from below deck. 

By bringing these marginal seafaring characters into the limelight, Rediker shows how maritime actors have shaped history that many have long regarded as national and landed. And by casting these rebels by sea as cosmopolitan workers of the world, he reminds us that to understand the rise of capitalism, globalization, and the formation of race and class, we must look to the sea. 

From the Hardcover edition.

Review

Praise for The Slave Ship: "Masterly." Adam Hochschild, New York Times Book Review "Searingly brilliant." Los Angeles Times Book Review "I was hardly prepared for the profound emotional impact of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Reading it established a transformative and never to be severed bond with my African ancestors who were cargo in slave ships over a period of four centuries." Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple "The Slave Ship is the best of histories, deeply researched, brilliantly formulated, and morally informed." Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone

About the Author

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age.