Backhouse had one solution to the crisis of the seventeenth century, Winstanley another. At the beginning of the century, the worry of the ruling class had been overpopulation, hence the plantations, migrations, colonizations, and scarcely veiled suggestions of genocide; by the end of the century, the rulers were fretting about the opposite. Thus, qualitatively new policies for the creation of labor power—the mobilization of sailors, the attention to reproduction in utero, and the African slave trade—emerged as fundamental tasks of the mercantilist state. English rulers, merchants, and planters dispossessed tens of thousands more in Ireland, Barbados, West Africa, and Virginia, making slavery the foundation of Atlantic capitalism.96 Winstanley’s encounter with Backhouse helped him to formulate a new and different answer to the crisis: he took up commoning and became a theorist of the commons, but within an enlarging perspective. Just as English cloth was exported to Africa, where it would be traded for slaves to be shipped to Barbados, Winstanley saw that justice could not be a national project, nor could the commons exist in one country only: “Money must not any longer . . . be the great god that hedges in some, and hedges out others.”97 When in July 1649 he wrote, “The teeth of all nations hath been set on edge by this sour grape, the covetous murdering sword,” he had Barbados and Gambia in mind. He moved toward a planetary consciousness of class: “English Christians are in a lower and worser condition than the heathens,” he lamented, smarting from the old wound, that English Christians cheated and cozened. “Surely, the life of the heathens shall rise up in judgement against you, from the greatest to the least.”98 His declaration of April 30, 1649, on behalf of the common people was addressed to “the powers of England and to all the powers of the world.” Deliverance from oppression would rise “among the poor common people” and “spring up to all nations,” and “all the commons and waste ground in England and in the whole world shall be taken in by the people in righteousness.”99
After being thrown off George’s Hill in January 1650, Winstanley summed up, “I have writ, I have acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the spirit do his own work in the hearts of others, and whether England shall be the first land, or some other, wherein truth shall sit down in triumph.”100 Despite the defeats inflicted by Winstanley’s enemies on London Levellers, Irish soldiers, Barbadian servants, and Virginia slaves, truth did sit down in other lands. It sat in swampy tri-isolate communities; it swayed on the decks of deep-sea ships; it rubbed shoulders with the poor in the taverns of the divaricated port cities; it strained for a hearing on the benches of the churches of the Great Awakening, or on stools on the dirt floors of slave cabins at night. In England, it seemed to pause: “Now the Spirit spreading itself from East to West, from North to South in sons and daughters is everlasting, and never dies; but is still everlasting, and rising higher and higher in manifesting himself in and to mankind.”101 This was the everlasting gospel, which would migrate to the western Atlantic before returning in so many words to England with Ottobah Cugoano and William Blake: the struggle against slavery, the struggle for the commons.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hydrarchy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State
When I was free once more,
I was like Adam when he was first created.
I had nothing at all, and therefore resolved to
join the privateers or buccaneers. . ..
—A. O. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (1678)
All the ships crews are drawn out,
and the slaves that have deserted
to us from the plantations
are all brave determin’d fellows. . ..
—John Gay, Polly: An Opera (1729)
RICHARD BRAITHWAITE, who supported Parliament in the English Revolution and lost a son to Algerian pirates, described the seventeenth-century mariner:
He was never acquainted with much civility; the sea hath taught him other rhetoric. . . . He cannot speak low, the sea talks so loud. His advice is seldom taken in naval affairs; though his hand is strong, his headpeace is stupid. . . . Stars cannot be more faithful in their society than these Hans-kins in their fraternity. They will have it valiantly when they are ranked together, and relate their adventures with wonderful terror. Necessary instruments are they, and agents of main importance in that Hydrarchy wherein they live; for the walls of the State could not subsist without them; but least useful they are to themselves, and most needful for others supportane.1
Sailors telling tales belowdecks, c. 1810. Charles Napier Robinson, A Pictorial History of the Sea Services, or Graphic Studies of the Sailor’s Life and Character Afloat and Ashore (1911). Brown Military Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.
The upper-class Braithwaite condescended to his subject, calling him loud, stupid, even savage, but he knew him well. He knew that sailors were essential to English expansion, commerce, and the mercantilist state. He knew, moreover, that they had ways of their own—their own language, storytelling, and solidarity.
In this chapter we will employ Braithwaite’s term hydrarchy to designate two related developments of the late seventeenth century: the organization of the maritime state from above, and the self-organization of sailors from below. As the strong hands of Brathwaite’s 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, a place to which and in which the ideas and practices of revolutionaries defeated and repressed by Cromwell and then by King Charles escaped, re-formed, circulated, and persisted. The period between the 1670s and the 1730s marked a new phase in the history of Atlantic capitalism, one in which the breakthrough discussed in the previous chapter was consolidated and institutionalized amid new and geographically expanded class struggles. During the pause when revolutionary ideas and action seemed to be missing from or muted in landed society, hydrarchy arose at sea to pose the era’s most serious challenge to the development of capitalism.
IMPERIAL HYDRARCHY, OR THE MARITIME STATE
The seizure of land and labor in England, Ireland, Africa, and the Americas laid the military, commercial, and financial foundations for capitalism and imperialism, which could be organized and maintained only through Braithwaite’s hydrarchy, the maritime state. A decisive moment in this development was the terrifying discovery by Cromwell and Parliament in 1649 that they had only fifty naval vessels with which to defend their republic against the monarchs of Europe, who did not look happily upon the severed head of Charles I. The new rulers of England urgently (and permanently) mobilized the shipyards at Chatham, Portsmouth, Woolwich, and Deptford to build the necessary ships. They passed “Laws and Ordinances Martial” authorizing impressment and warranting the death penalty for resistance, as a means to provide the necessary labor. By 1651 the New Model Navy had defeated the royalists at sea and begun to menace, even intimidate, the still-hostile other governments of Europe. England’s new men took immediate steps to extend their commercial and military power by sea, enacting two linked pieces of legislation: one for the merchant shipping industry, the Navigation Act of 1651, and another for the Royal Navy, the Articles of War of 1652. These two acts, both reaffirmed by the Restoration government after 1660, would dramatically expand the powers of the maritime state.2
With these acts Cromwell and Parliament signaled their intention to challenge the Dutch for maritime supremacy and to assert their own sovereignty in the Atlantic. The writers of the first act intended to displace the Dutch as primary carriers of the transatlantic trades by reserving imports for English vessels. In 1660, a new Navigation Act detailed the Atlantic commodities to be shipped by English merchants, sailors, and ships. An additional act, of 1673, established a staff to police colonial trade, enforce the acts, and make sure that the king was getting his proper share of the booty. Parliament emphasized fo
reign trade as the way to advance English shipping and economic power. In 1629 English merchants shipped only 115,000 tons of cargo; by 1686 that figure had tripled, to 340,000 tons, with a corresponding increase in the number of sailors who handled such immense amounts of cargo. The lucrative Atlantic trades in tobacco, sugar, slaves, and manufactures led English merchant shipping to expand at a rate of 2 to 3 percent a year from roughly 1660 to 1690.3
The success of the Navigation Acts depended on accompanying changes in the Royal Navy. The Articles of War of 1652 imposed the death penalty in twenty-five out of thirty-nine clauses and proved an effective means for governing English ships during the war against the Dutch. After the Press Act of 1659 (which renewed the martial law of 1649), the articles were reenacted in 1661 as the Naval Discipline Act, which established the power of courts martial and specified the death penalty for desertion. Meanwhile, Samuel Pepys set about reorganizing the English navy in other respects, professionalizing the officer corps and building more, ever bigger, and ever more powerful ships. During the second Dutch war, some three thousand sailors deserted the English navy to fight for the enemy, which moved English authorities to stage highly visible executions of deserters and to make “flogging round the fleet” a frequent form of discipline. The Articles of War were renewed yet again in 1674, during a third war against the Dutch. The transformation of the Royal Navy during these years can be summarized in terms that parallel almost perfectly the development of the merchant shipping industry: the navy had 50 ships and 9,500 sailors in 1633, and 173 ships and 42,000 sailors in 1688.4
If Cromwell inaugurated the maritime state and Charles II realized its promise, finally displacing the Dutch as the hegemonic Atlantic power, it was because of advisers such as Sir William Petty (1623–1687), the father of political economy or, as it was called in his day, political arithmetic. Petty, who wrote the Political Anatomy of Ireland for Charles II, had begun his working life as a cabin boy at sea. He was part of England’s conquering army in Ireland, serving as physician general in 1652 and cartographer of confiscated lands in the Down survey of 1654 (he took fifty thousand acres for himself in County Kerry, where he organized hewers of wood, fishermen, quarrymen, lead miners, and iron workers.) Such experiences gave him a clear understanding of the primary importance of land, labor, and transatlantic connections. Labor, he believed, was the “father . . . of wealth, as lands are the mother.” Labor had to be mobile—and labor policy transatlantic—because lands were far-flung. He advocated shipping felons to plantations overseas: “Why should not insolvent thieves be rather punished with slavery than death? so as being slaves they may be forced to as much labour, and as cheap fare, as nature will endure, and thereby become as two men added to the commonwealth, and not as one taken away from it.”5 He noted the increasing importance of the slave trade to imperial planning: “The accession of Negroes to the American plantations (being all Men of great labour and little expence) is not inconsiderable.” He included reproduction in his calculus, projecting that the fertility of women in New England would compensate for losses in Ireland. Based on the assumption that “you value the people who have been destroyed in Ireland as Slaves and Negroes are usually rated, viz., at about £15 one with another; Men being sold for £25 and Children £5 each,” he estimated the financial losses of the war in Ireland (1641–51) at £10,355,000.6 Petty’s main point, however, was that ships and sailors were the real basis of English wealth and power. “Husbandmen, Seamen, Soldiers, Artizans, and merchants, are the very Pillars of any Common-Wealth,” he wrote, but the seaman was perhaps most important of all, as “every Seaman of industry and ingenuity, is not only a Navigator, but a Merchant, and also a Soldier.” He concluded, “The Labour of Seamen, and Freight of Ships, is always of the nature of an Exported Commodity, the overplus whereof above what is Imported, brings home money, etc.”7 Sailors thus produced surplus value above the costs of production, including their own subsistence; the political arithmetician called this process “superlucration.” Petty thus originated the labor theory of value by refusing to think of workers in moral terms; he preferred the quantifiable approach of number, weight, and measure. His method of thinking was essential to the genesis and the long-term planning of the maritime state.
Such planning emerged during the quarter century surrounding the three Anglo-Dutch wars (roughly 1651–75), when the shipping industry and the navy took on their modern forms, but it reached a new stage after the accession of William III in 1688 and the declaration of war against France the following year. Just as the theater of merchant shipping had in recent years shifted from the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the North Sea to the Atlantic—to Africa, the Caribbean, and North America—so the theater of war followed, moving from the northern seas, where the Anglo-Dutch wars had been fought, to the Atlantic, where a broader and more forthright battle for overseas trade and territories would be waged. English rulers fought to protect their plantation economies, and not only against France and Spain. At the request of sugar planters and merchants who now wanted to trade and smuggle goods to New Spain, Sir Robert Holmes commissioned a squadron of ships in 1688 to dispatch the buccaneers who had once been based in Jamaica. The freebooters who had filled Jamaican coffers with Spanish gold were now an obstacle to a more orderly accumulation of capital, which would soon be planned from London and carried out on an Atlantic scale. “It is a sign of the growing importance of the distant colonies and oceanic trades in the estimation of all Europe,” wrote J. H. Parry, “that the age of the buccaneers should be followed by the age of the admirals.”8
The consolidation of the maritime state took place in the 1690s, by which time the Royal Navy had become England’s greatest employer of labor, its greatest consumer of material, and its greatest industrial enterprise. English rulers had discovered the navy as an instrument of national policy during the 1650s, in the defense of the republic, and had expanded its function as protector of shipping and overseas markets. A pamphleteer of 1689 echoed the Articles of War and the Naval Discipline Act of 1661 in writing that the navy was “the bulwark of our British dominions, the sole fence of our Country.”9 Here were Brathwaite’s “walls of the State,” an enclosure built around a new field of property whose value and appreciation were expressed in a congeries of changes in the 1690s: the concentration of maritime capital in joint stock companies, which grew from eleven in 1688 to more than a hundred by 1695; the formation of the Bank of England in 1694; the growth of the marine insurance industry; the beginnings of the deregulation of the Royal African Company (1698) and the emergence of the free traders who would in the next century make England the world’s greatest transporter of slaves; the increasing use of commercial newspapers; the booming importance of manufacture and the related export and reexport trades. The Act of Trade of 1696 brought all colonial affairs under the purview of the Board of Trade and generalized the admiralty court system throughout the empire. The Act of Trade consolidated the gains of the new Atlantic capitalism, but it also pointed to a threat that had not been eliminated by Holmes and the navy of 1688. One of the biggest and most worrying issues facing Parliament and the Board of Trade remained pirates: accordingly, Parliament passed an “Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy” in 1698, hoping to convince colonial administrators and citizens of the necessity of the death penalty for a crime that had long been tolerated and sometimes even encouraged.10
THE SHIP
By the last half of the seventeenth century, capitalists had organized the exploitation of human labor in four basic ways. The first of these was the big commercial estate for the practice of capitalist agriculture, whose American equivalent was the plantation, in many senses the most important mercantilist achievement. Second was petty production such as the yeoman farmer or prosperous artisan enjoyed. Third was the putting-out system, which had, in Europe, begun to evolve into the system of manufactures. In Africa and the Americas, European merchants put out firearms, which were used by their clients to capture people (t
o sell as slaves), to kill animals (for their furs), and to destroy a wealth of common ecologies. The fourth means of organizing the exploitation of labor was the mode of production that united all of the others in the sphere of circulation—namely, the ship.
Each way organized human labor differently. The large-scale estate and plantation were among the first sites in modern history of mass cooperation. Petty production remained the context for resourcefulness and independent individualism. Manufacture and the putting-out system created the fragmented, detail laborer whose “idleness” would become the bane of the eighteenth-century political economist. The ship, whose milieu of action made it both universal and sui generis, provided a setting in which large numbers of workers cooperated on complex and synchronized tasks, under slavish, hierarchical discipline in which human will was subordinated to mechanical equipment, all for a money wage. The work, cooperation, and discipline of the ship made it a prototype of the factory.11 Indeed, the very term factory evolved etymologically from factor, “a trading representative,” and specifically one associated with West Africa, where factories were originally located. One trading syndicate off the Gold Coast in the 1730s would anchor a ship permanently to serve as a base for stocks, intelligence gathering, and cargoes; it was called a floating factory. By 1700 the ship had become the engine of commerce, the machine of empire. According to Edward Ward, who wrote in defense of the maritime state, it was “the Sovereign of the Aquatic Globe, giving despotic laws to all the meaner Fry, that live upon that Shining Empire.” For Barnaby Slush, a defender of the skilled sailor, it was, however, “too big and unmanageable a machine to be run by novices.” Sailors and the ship thus linked the modes of production and expanded the international capitalist economy.12
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 17