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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Book of Eels by Tom Fort

December 23, 2020 – 5:12 pm

p 20 Talking to a fisherman near Hinckley Point

“He told me one day before the war, his father had caught a sturgeon in the nets weighing nearly a hundred pounds. “Seven foot long it were. Amazing. No. I’ve never seen another one.”

p. 24 An American anthropologist, Albert Herre, who worked in the Philippines in the 1920s, found a ‘well-developed’ eel cult among the Lepanti Igorots who lived near Mount Mougoa. They kept sacred eels in pols, which were fed daily on rice and sweet potatoes by devotees who sang songs of praise as they went about their work.”

p. 35 A Roman of Praeneste, Claudius Aelianus, who in the second century AD, complied a collection of contemporary curiosities entitled De Natura Animalium. .. his book also contains reference to fly fishing for trout, as practiced by the Macedonians, which subsequent investigation has shown to be – almost certainly – authentic and reliable.”

p. 40 “The first great English antiquary, John Leland, referred to Lanport market in Segdemoor being full of “peckles, as they call them, because they take them in those waters by pecking an eel speare in them when they lie in their beds”… Eel spears were still being made in the small Danish town of Skyum until 30 years ago, and Dr Christopher Moriarty records how commercial eel spearing contniued on the mudflats at Rosslare, in south-east Ireland, until the 1960s, when tidal changes refulted in the eel grounds being buried in sand.”

p. 56 “the eel is an ancient creature and a primitve one. But its primitiveness does not mean that it is simply made, only that it was perfectly made in the earliest times. In fact its sensory equipment is so complex as to defy analysis, even now. Scientists who have spent lifetimes dissecting eels and studying their habits sill do not have any clear idea how – for example – they find their way across the vast expanses of the ocean to their breeding grounds. The Irish pote, Seamus Heaney, was stirred by the mystery. In “The Return”, he wrote

Who knows if she knows

her depth and direction;

She’s passed Malin and

Tory, silent, wakeless,

A wisp, a wick, that is

Its own taper and light

Through the weltering dark.”

p. 111 “The quiet life they have pursued this past 10 or 15 years is coming to an end. THey are preparing for a journey, to fulfil their destiny. Their backs and flanks darken from greenish to near black, while their bellies turn from yellow to silver. They become firmer to the touch, as fat is stored in their body muscle. Their nostrils dilate and their eyes expand. They cease to eat, and their digestive tracts degenerate. The salt content in the blood diminishes. The sex organs, which run like ribbons through the bodies of males and females, swell.” The order to move is generally sensed at night, and the external circumstances that stimulate have been known for thousands of years and exploited to mankind’s dietary advantage. The night is dark and stormy, and the barometric pressure is low. The moon is in its last squarter, small and growing smaller. The river is high, swollen by rain, and the current is strong. The wind blows from the lake into the mouth of the river leading to the sea, the stronger the better. Although there will be a trickle of migrating eels at any time, in any conditions, between August and the end of the year, it is this concert of effects which triggers the sudden and overwhelming collective impulse to depart, the mass exodus…. The records of the Comacchio fishery relate that on the night of 4 October 1697, the fishermen took 322,520kg of eel – around 300 tons, perhaps three quarters of a million fish, in one night’s work… these mighty harvests belong to the distant past.”

p. 114 Its skin is able, when moist, to absorb up to 90% of its oxygen requirement. The skin also plays a vital part in permitting the fish to pass without distress from freshwater to saltwater. … the thickness of the skin and the mucus with which it is so lavishly coated make it unusually resistant to the process known as osmosis”.

p. 127 “On the Thames the elver run was known as the eel fare. It usually began towards the end of April and was the occasion for Londoners to arm themselves with sieves and nets, take off their shoes, roll up their trousers, and help themselves. In 1832 Dr William Roots of Kingston upon Thames kept watch on a column close to the bank. It proceeded continuuously for five days, and he calculated that up to 1800 elvers were passing each minute.”

p. 132 “there is no evidence to support the charge – endlessly repeated by ignorant proprietors of trout and salmon fisheries, their keepers and some anglers – that they are destructive predators of salmon and trout eggs. These fish generally spawn during the winter and early spring, when eels are buried in mud, motionless and fasting, their metabolism merely yicking over… eels eat when they need to, and they are frequently caught with entirely empty stomachs, which – considering it takes them up to three days to digest a meal – suggests an abstemious attitude to the pleasures of the table.”

p. 157 In 1908 a delegation of fishmongers and fishery owners from Hamburg arrived in Gloucester. They had heard of the extraordinary scale of the Severn elver run, and wished to obtain supplies with which to supplement the stocks in German rivers and lakes which were insufficient to meet demand for eel. They were given permission to establish a depot at Epney, behind the Anchor Inn, from where the babies were shipped live back to Hamburg. It was an unusual trading link, but evidently a profitable one, for the depot was still flourishing in 1939, when the Ministry of Agriculture took possession of it and sent the Germans back home”

p. 170 a splendid print datying back from around 1800, called Eel Bobbing at Battersea. An old woman is sitting in a boat held in position a yard or two from the bank of the Thames by a pole driven into the mud. Beyond her, on the far side, standing out againsy a pale coral sky, rise the spire of a church and a windmill. She has a pipe jammed into her mouth, a round hat on her head, a blanket over her knees, a barrel in the sterm. She is grasping a sturdy piece of tumber in her honry hands, from the end of which, descending into the calm, oily water is a line. Somewhere beneath is the ball of worsted and worms, and once she feels teeth in it, up it will come, and there will be pie for supper, or perhaps eel in jelly”

p. 175 “the supply of live eels to the one great central fish market – at Billingsgate in London – was already largely controlled by the Dutch well before 1412, when the Lord Mayor decreed they should be sold by weight only. The vessels used for transporting and storing them were known as schuyts. Bulging with their perforated eel prisons, they became a familiar sight in London, as the companies owning them had been granted the right to anchor off Billingsgate for ease of access. In the late 17th century the official concession to supply eels to the market was bestowed by royal decree, partly in acknowledgement of the part played by the masters and crew of the schuyts in fighting the Great Fire of 1666 and providing food and shelter for the homeless victims. The main condition of the concession was that there should be at least one shop filled with eels in position at all times”

p. 268 “almost all the figures point to steep and continuing reductions in stock levels, and the eel watchers are of pretty much one mind. Some judge the decline to be critical, others prefer ‘significant’ or #dramatic#…no one knows what impact eel fishing is having, because no one knows how many eele there are and how many are being caught. Anyway, the effect of fishing is but one of the factors determining population dynamics. Others include the creeping advance on both sides of the Atlantic of the parasitic nematode Anguillicola crassus, which destroys the fish’s swimbladder, the spread of a herpes virus which attacks blood-forming tiss,e contaminations by PCBs and other pollutants, and the loss of habitat due to the draining of wetlands and the construction of dams… the Sargossa Sea itself has been given a generally clean bill of health .. but there is deep concern about a transport system that delivers the baby eels to the shores of Europe and North America, and the deepending suspicioun that the great alliance between the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current may be faltering… the warming of the Arctic Ocean might be eroding the vigour”

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Books Feminism Politics

Notes from Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot

November 15, 2020 – 10:06 pm

p3 For women who are struggling to keep themselves housed, fed and clothed, it’s not a question of working hard enough… They need feminism to recognise that everything that affects women is a feminist issue, whether it be food insecurity or access to transit, schools or a living wage…the languagr surrounding whatever issues feminists choose to focus on should reflect an understanding of how the issue’s impact varies for women in different socioeconomic positions. ,,, We can’t let respectabilirt politics … create an idea that only some women are worthy of respect and protection. Respectability narratives discourage us from addressing thr needs of sex workers, incracerated women or anyone else who has had to face hard life choices.”

p. 9 There is a tendency to debate who is a ‘real’ feminist based on political leanings, background, actions, or even the kinds of media created and consumed. It’s the kind of debate that blasts Beyonce and Nicki Minaj for their attire and stage shows not being feminist enough, while celebrating Katie Perry for being empowering – via the fetishization and appropriation of cultures and bodies of colour. Real feminism |(if such a thing can be defined) isn’t going to be found in replicating racist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist or classist norms. But we are all human, all flawed in our own ways, and perhaps most important, none of us are immune to the environment that surrounds us.”

p. 95 the people most addicted to maintaining the status quo are those who reap the greatest rewards. It’s not that there is no bigotry in the hood, but much of it comes in from institutions and ends up being transmitted in media. Churches, politicians, even some educational intitutions teach hate and normalize it long before it ends up in a song lyric or being parroted in an interview by a newly famouse 26-year-old”.

p 174 Povert is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horesmen.”

p. 214 “Being a marginalized parent is an emotional and social tightrope over a hard floor without a net.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace

October 18, 2020 – 6:03 pm

p. 12 George Washington and Alexander Hamilton … The United States, they decided, would have to become economically self-sufficient to guarantee its newfound political indeendence… To use the language of Ricardo, Ameicans would have to make both cloth and wine, regardless of what any economic theory might suggest… Under the right conditions, the new United States could transform itself into a manufacturing superpower – but those conditions needed to be created by a strong state to encourage the market to create the right sort of manufacturing capacity.”

p. 13 “the goal was to promotr entrepreneurship and investment. Hamilton believed that the guaranteed domestic market would make it easier for Americans to start new businesses in what were then the high tech industries of textiles, nails, glassmaking, and gun-making.”

p. 16 “in 1941, List expanded his ideas into The National System of Political Economy, a mix of theory, history and reporting mean to give statesmen in what he hoped would become the new German nation. His thesis was that “free competition between two nations which are highly civilised can only be mutually beneficial in case both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development.” A country such as Germany, which was less developed but “possesses the “mental and material means ” to become wealthy, should insyead avoid free trade and “strengthen her own individual powers”.

p. 28 “American exports of goods to Canada and Mexico are worth about as much as US exports of goods to the European Union, China, Japan and Korea combined. Much of the value of US exports to its neighbours, however, comes from elsewhere. A seatbelt for an American-made care or light truck, for example, might have its fibers manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed to take advantage of abundant water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States.”

p. 29 “The increasing importance of these global value chains means that conventional bilateral trade data no longer do a good job of measuring the actual value created by workers and machines in each country. .. For the United states, imports are overstated by about 16% while exports are overstated by about 20%. Chinese imports and exports are both overstated by about 30%.”

p. 30 Qhwn the US income tax was introduced in 1913, it assessed nothing on money earned abroad. Nobody seemed to mind until the 1950s when American companies started agreessively relocating parts of their businesses to foreign countries to exploit lower tax rates. By the early 1960s, this was starting to have a meaningful impact on the tax base.”

p. 31 “Everything changed in 1996 with Treasury DEcision 8697. The new rule, which came to be known as ‘check-the-box’ by practitioners, was supposed to make things sipler for tax filers and make life easier for Internal Revenue Service examiners. Instead, it opened up massive loopoles in the corporate tax code. Among other things, income from royalties and licences could now be treated the same as income from foreign factories. The IRS quickly recognized tsome of the implications and proposed a new rule … but political interference blocked any fix.”

p. 32 “As foreign sales rose in importance and large US companies got better at profit shirting, their effective tax rate dropped from a bit over 35% in thre mid-1990s to about 30% by the early 2000s to about 26% by the mid-2010s. Although the tax law passed at the end of 2017 lowered the effective corporate tax rate below 20% and more or less replaced America’s worldwide system of corporate taxation with a territorial system, it did not remove the incentives for profit shifting.”

p. 104 Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsorred income concentration creates a potent group of ‘vested interests’… that will fiercely resist ant reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment process will require a new relationship between the government, the people and the elites.”

p. 222 From a certain perspective, the United States – and the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, all of which play a similar role in the global economy — therefore resembles the importial colonies of Europe in the late 19th century. Back then, subject peoples were forced to buy Europe’s excess production in exchange for taking on unneeced debt. Remarkably, a similar situation exists today. Instead of violence, however, the modern regime depends on the English-speaking countries’ political commitment to open markets. This is a choice, but in democracies, the people have the option to change their mind.”

p. 223 “addressing trade imbalances through tariffs is likely to be ineffective at best and harmful under certain conditions. That is why it matters that capital controls are becoming increasinly popular, especially in other English-speaking economies. New Zeland recently banned all nonresidents from buying residential property. Australia limits foreign buyers to new homes, which has helped stimulate construction, and it taxes foreign purchases, although the rates vary state by state. Some local governments in Canada have begun taxing foreign purchasers of housing…. When the system was first constructed, the US exonomy was about equal in size to the entire rest of the world. Today, however, the United States makes up less than a quarter of global output. Compared to 70 years ago, the rest of the world is now three times bigger relative to the United States, which means that America has far less capacity to absorn the rest of the world’s savings imbalances. If the US share of the global economy continues to shrink, the burden imposed on Americans will continue to rise until … the system will break down. Yet no one in the American political mainstream has felt comfortable challenging this system until recently. This apparent surprise can be explained by America’s own class wars. After all, plenty of Americans have prospoered producing financial assets to accommodate the rest of the world’s excess savings.. inflates the incomes of the financiers… as well as their political clout.”

Interesting book, though still struggling to understand how it could be written now with _no_ reference I could find (and none in the index) to climate emergency and environmental limits.

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Books Politics

Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers by David Scott Fitzgerald

July 8, 2020 – 2:48 pm

p. 253

Persecuted people seeking asylum must first reach a territory where they can make a claim. Governments of countries in the Global North try to evade the spirit of refugee protection laws, while plausibly complying with their letter, by keep asylum seekers away from their borders using techniques of remote control. Legal scholars have rightly criticized the “hyper-legal” logic of these policies. The fact that so many people who are able to evade the deadly barriers have successfully gained asylum highlights tha these policies deliveratly prevent refugees from reaching sanctuary. The reluctance of governments to rescue drowning refugees at the conclusion of the Mare Nostrum program in the Med in 2014 encapsulates the basic logic of remote control of people seeking asylum. Leaders in the Global North know people are dying. As long as government agents and refugees are not situated in a common physical space, governments deny responsibility. By cracking down on NGos at sea, governments ensure that even private actors are not in a position to render aid or force the state to activate norms of rescue and sanctuary.”

p. 264 “In a speech to the European Parliament in 2014, Pope Francis… “We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery!”.. Yet the Med continues to be a cemetery without graves. Since the 1930s it has swallowed Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Eritreans and Ethiopians, Somalis and Syrians, and Palestinians fleeing Israel’s cage around Gaza. Buffering and interception takes place at sea, in Central American jungles, and deserts from Sonora to the Sahara.”

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Books Politics

Notes from The Far Right Today, by Cas Muddle

July 6, 2020 – 3:47 pm

“These on the Fourth Wave”

p. 164 “While the extreme right remains largely marginal and marginalized, the populist radical right has become mainstreamed in most western democracies. Mainstreaming takes places because populist radical right parties and mainstream parties address increasinly similar issues and because they offer increasingly similar issue positions. The change can come from movement by the populist radical right (moderation) by the mainstream (radicalization), or by both at the same time (convergence).

At the beginning of the third wave, populist radical right parties were seen as ‘niche parties’ which mainly addressed socio-cultural issues like crime and immigration. In contrast, mainstream parties competed primiarly on the basis of socio-economic issues like taxation and unemployment. But in the last two decades, socio-cultural issues have come to dominate the political adenda. .. mainstream and populist radical right parties not only address the same issues, they also increasingly offer similar issue positions. Research shows that this is the consequence more of the radicalization of mainstream parties than of the moderation of populist radical right parties…. mainstream parties have radicalized, mocing further towards the (populist radical) right in terms of, first and foremost, immigration and integration, but also law and order, European integration (or international collaboration more generally), and populism.”

p. 166 “in some countries they do not even have to be (officially) part of the government to dictate a significant part of its agenda, most notably immigration and integration policies, such as in the Czech Republic, Frnace, of the UK. It is important to remember that this is taking place as populist radical right parties are still, in almost all countries, a political minority – on average the third biggest party in the country.”

p. 169 “Populist radical right parties, and particularly ideas, are increasingly tolerated, and even embraced, by business, civil society, economic, media and political circles. This has reached new levels in the wake of Brexit and Trump in 2016, which saw an outpouring of understanding for ‘working-class voters’ that was often framed within an outright populist narrative. The common people (“Somewheres”) were the political victims of an out-of-touch elite (“Anywheres”). This frame is not just pushed in rightwing media, notably Murdoch-owned media in Anglo-Saxon countries, but also enthusiastically embraced by liveral media. .. it reduces the working class to just whites and nativists, another problematic simplification”.

p. 172 “Most far-right groups are ambivalent sexist: that is, combining aspects of both benevolent sexism and hostile sexism… more traditional interpretations of masculinity predominate, in which men are expected to be strong protectors of weak women, toxic masculinity, in which mental and sexual frustration is taken out on independent and ‘opinionated’ women is increasingly prominent.”

p179 What to do in response? “Rather than following the far right’s issues, let alone their frames, we should address the issues that concern us, as well as the majority of the population, and posit our own, ideologically informed, positions…. we should set clear limits to what collaborations and positions are consistent with liberal democratic values – ideally before we are confronted with a significant far-right challenge.”

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Books Early modern history Feminism History London Politics Women's history

Notes from The Many-Headed Hydra – Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

April 18, 2020 – 6:40 pm


P. 36 Sir Walter Ralegh “developed a historical interpretation of Hercules.. Helped to establish kingship, or political sovereignty, and commerce, under the dominance of a particular ethnic group, the Greeks. He served as a model for the exploration, trade, conquest and plantation of English mercantilism: indeed a cult of Hercules suffused English ruling-class culture in the 17th century.” Some Ralegh noted “apply his works historically to their own conceits”

P. 44 “An Act of Parliament of 1600 made it possible for big shareholders in the fens to suppress the common rights that stood in the way of their drainage schemes… King James organized hundred in the draining and enclosure of parts of Somerset in the early 17th century, turning a commoning economy of fishing, fowling, reed cutting, and peat digging into a capitalist economy of sheep raising…. The ‘battle of the fens’ began in 1605 between capital owners such as Lord Chief Justice Popham (“covetous and bloodie Popham”) and the fowlers, fenmen and commoners. The terms of battle ranged from murder, sabotage and village burning on the one hand to protracted litigation, pampleteering and the advanced science of hydraulics on the other.. Sporadic outbursts of opposition…. Often led by women, attacked workmen, ditches, dikes and tools in Hatfield, on the Isle of Axholme, and elsewhere in the late 1620s and 1630s.”

P. 64 “In 1607 ‘Captain Dorothy’ led 37 women wielding knives and throwing stones against the enclosures of Kirky Malzeard in the North Riding of Yorkshire… Armed women also spearheaded food riots, in 1595 seizing food corn at Wye, in 1605 marching on the Medway ports to prevent the export of grain, and in 1608 going so far as to broad grain ships in Southampton to keep their cargo from being shopped away. During the Western Rising (1629-31) women again led food riots, this time in Berkshire and Essex.”

P. 65 Thomas Edward’s Gangreana describes his “combat against the ‘three bodied Monster Geryon, and the three headed Cerberus,” and “that Hydra also, ready to rise up in their place”.

P. 72 “an extraordinary text about a woman named Francis, a “blackymore maide” who, as a member of a radical religious congregation in Bristol during the 1640s provided leadership especially to the women of the congregation. The text was written by a church elder, Edward Tertill, which means that ours cannot be a simple story.. She was black: he was white. She was a woman: he was a man. She was a sister in the congregation; he was an elder of the church.. Helps to illuminate the dynamics of race, class, and gender in the English Revolution and to show how the radical voices were ultimately silenced. The outcome of the English Revolution might have been dramatically altered: the commons might have been preserved: values other than those of market society and commodity production might have triumphed: work might not have been seen as the condition of human salvation; patriarchy in the family might not have been saved, nor the labor of women devalued; torture and terror might not have survived in the law and its practice; popular assemblies might have proliferated and become open; mutual subsistence rather than individual accumulation might have become the basis of economic activity; and divisions between master and slave might have been abolished.”

P. 82 Francis “asks a sister in the congregation to carry her message to the whole assembly, not to “loose ye glory of God in their families, neighbourhoods or places where God casts them.” She recognises that a neighbourhood may be international, a notion of shipmates, a family of oceanic passages. Francis understands community without propinquity. .. She would have known about slavery and the struggle against slavery. On May Day 1638, for instance, the first African slave rebellion in English history took place in Providence Island. From the wharves, Francis would have brought Atlantic news to her congregation.. We do not know where Francis lived before Bristol.”

P. 112 “On July 7, 1647, a Neopolitan fisherman named Masaniello led a protest by the market women, carters, porters, sailors, fishermen, weavers, silk winders, and all the other poor, or lazzaroni, of the second- or third-largest city in Europe.. Producers rural and urban discovered that the Spanish viceroy had levied a new gabelle, or tax, on the city’s fabled fruit (Goethe believed that the Neapolitans had invented lemonade)… the price of bread fell to rates consistent with a moral economy… Although it lasted only 10 days, the revolt of Naples in July 1647 marked the first time tha the proletariat of any European vity seized power and governed alone… English merchants had recently eclipsed their Italian counterparts in Levant shipping and now sent as many as 120 ships and 3,000 sailors to Naples each year, with attendant desertions and turnovers. Sailors were a major source of information about the the revolt.. In 1649 T.B. published a play entitled The Rebellion of Naples”.

P. 116 “If the Masaniello revolt and the Putney Debates of 1647 represented a high point of revolutionary possibility, the downfall began in 1649…execution of the King and ..

“The execution by firing squad of Robert Lockyer, a soldier, on April 27, originated in the grumblings of unpaid soldiers against what they called the ‘cutthroat expedition’ to Ireland, which escalated into mutiny at Bishopsgate in April … Cromwell, fearing a general rising of ‘discontented persons, servants reformadoes, beggars’ rode to Bishopsgate with Fairfax to lead the suppression of the mutiny, .. When the moment of execution came, Lockyer disdained a blindfold and appealed to his executioners, brother soldiers, to put down their guns. They refused, fire and killed him. Thousands, wearing green (the colour of the Levellers and of Thomas Rainsborough) thronged the streets of London at his funeral.”

P. 150 “The expansion of the merchant shipping industry and the Royal Navy during the third quarter of the 17th century posed an enduring dilemma for the maritime state: how to mobilize, organize, maintain and reproduce the sailoring proletariat in a situation of labor scarcity and limited state resources … one result was a fitful but protracted war among rulers, planners, merchants, captains, naval officers, sailors, and other urban workers over the value and purposes of maritime labor. Since conditions aboard ship were harsh and wages often two or three years in arrears, sailors mutinied, deserted, rioted, and altogether resister naval service… the state used violence and terror to man its ships and to man them cheaply.. For sailors, the press-gang represented slavery and death: three out of four pressed men died within two years, with only one in five of the dead expiring in battle. Those lucky enough to survive could not expect to be paid, as it was not uncommon, writes John Ehrman.. For a seaman to be owed a decade’s wages”.

P. 151 “Even though the Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that three fourths of the crew importing English goods were to be English or Irish… English ships continued to be worked by African, Briton, quashee, Irish and American (not to mention Dutch, Portugese and lascar ) sailors. Ruskin was therefore correct in saying, “The nails that fasten together the planks of the boar’s cow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world.” .. William Petty “Whereas the Employment of other Men is confined to their own Country, that of Seamen is free to the whole world.”

P. 154 “The multilinguality and Atlantic experience common to many Africans was demonstrated by a back man in the Comoros ISlands of the Indian Ocean in 1694, who greeted pirate Captain Henry Avery, the ‘maritime Robin Hood’, in English. The man, as it happened, had lived in Bethnal Green, London.”

p. 228 [In America] “Multiracial mobs helped win numerous victories for the revolutionary movement, especially, as we have seen against impressment. .. In 1765, “Sailors, boys, and Negroes to the number of above Five Hundred” rioted against impressment in Newport, Rogode Island, and in 1767 a mob of “Whites & Blacks all arm’d” attacked Captain Jeremiah Morgan in a press riot in Norfolk… the motley crew led a broad array of people into resistance against the Stamp Act, which taxed the colonists by requiring stamps for the sale and use of various commodities… Boston’s mob took angry action agains the propoerty of stamp distributor Andrew Oliver of August 14, 1765, then 12 days later turned an even fiercer wrath against the house and refined belongings of Thomas Hutchinson, who cried out at the crowd, ‘You are so many Masaniellos!”

P. 232 “I found myself surrounded by a motley crew of wretches, with tethered farments and pallid visages,” wrote Thomas Bring as he began his imprisonment in 1782 anoard the notorious hulk Jersey, a British man-of-war serving as a prison ship in the East River of New York… Amid the hunger, thirst, rot, gore, terror, and violence, and the deaths of seven or eight thousand of their fellow inmates during the war, the prisoners organised themselves according to egalitarian, collectivist, revolutionary principles. What had once functioned as ‘articles’ among seamen and pirates now became ‘a Code of By-Laws… for their own regulation and government.” Equal before the rats, the smallpox, and the guard’s cutlass, they practiced democracy, working to distribute food and clothing fairly, to provide medical care, to bury their dead. On one ship a common sailor spoke between decks on Sundays to honor those who died ‘in vindication of the rights of Man.” A captain who looked back with surprise on the self-organization of the prisoners remarked that the seamen were “of that class.. Who are not easily controlled, and usually not the most ardent supporters of good order.” But the sailors drew on the traditions of hydrarchy as they implemented the order of the day: they governed themselves.”

P. 246 The failure of the motley crew to find a place in the new American nation forced it into broader, more creative forms of identification. One of the phrases often used to capture the unity of the age of revolution was ‘citizen of the world’. J. Philmore described himself this way, as did others, including Thomas Paine. The real citizens of the world, of course, were the sailors and slaves who instructed… the middle- and upper-class revolutionaries. This multiethnic proletariat was ‘cosmopolitan’ in the original meaning of the world. Reminded that he had been sentenced to exile, Dioegenes, the slave philosopher of antiquity, responded by saying that he sentenced his hudges to stay home… The Irshman Oliver Goldsmith published in 1762 a gentle critique of nationalism entitled Citizen of the World featuring characters such as a sailor with a wooden leg and a ragged woman ballad singer… James Howell, historian of the Masaniello Revolt, wrote in the 17th century that ‘every ground may be one’s country – for by birth each man is in this world a cosmopolitan’.

P. 250 “Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ were the Albion Mills, the first London steam-powered factory.. Erected in 1791, this flour mill had been burned to the ground that same year, as part of the anonymous, direct resistance to the industrial revolution.”

P. 272 “Edward and Catherine Despard reached London in the spring of 1790,… found a country where workers had embraced the cause of abolition. Seven hundred and 69 Sheffield cutlers had petition Parliament in 1789 against the efforts of the pro-slavery lobby. “The cutlery wares made by the freemen .. being sent in considerable quantities to the Coast of Africa, and dis[sed of, in part, as the price of Slaves – your Petitioners may be supposed to be prejudiced in their interests if the said trade in Slaves should be abolished. But your petitioners having always understood that the natives of Africa” – and here they would have remembered Olaudah Equano’s talks with them as he lectured on the abolition circuit- “ have the greatest aversion to foreign Salvery. Claiming to “consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own”, and putting principle before material interest, the cutlers took an unusual public stand against slavery, something no English workers had done in almost a century and a half. Joseph Mather, the poetic annalist of proletarian Sheffield, sand,

As negroes inVirginia,

In Maryland or Guinea,

Like them I must continue – 

To be both bought and sold.

While negro ships are filling

I ne’er can save one shilling,

And must, which is more killing,

A pauper die when old.”

Sheffield was a steel town, manufacturing the sickles and scythes of harvest, the scissors and razors of the export markets, and the pike, implement of the people’s war. The secretary of the workers’ organisation, the Sheffield Constitutional Society (formed in 1791), explained its purpose: “To enlighten the people, to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sudderings, when a man works for 13 or 14 hours of the day, the week through, and is not able to maintain his family; that is what I understand of it; to show the people the ground of this; why they were not able.” The Constitutional Society also declared itself against slavery, much like the London Corresponding SOciety, which.. Was founded early in 1792 is discussions of ‘having all things in common’ and committed to equality among all, whether ‘back or white, high low low, rich or poor.”

P. 292 “ In the modern era, jubilee was employed by the English revolutionaries of the 1640s, including James Nayler and the early Quakers and Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers, as a means of resisting both expropriation and slavery. It remained a living idea after the revolution, to be carried forward by John Milton, John Bunyan and James Jarrington (Ocean).. In 1782 Thomas Spence wrote “The Jubilee Hymn”… born in 1750 in Newcastle. Growing up on the waterfront as one of 19 children… young Spence joined the congregation of John Glas, a Presbyterian schismatic who followed the tenets of the primitive Christian as he understood them.. The bourgeoisie was then seeking to seel of lease 89 acres of the town common, a plan thwarted by the commoners, who pulled down the lessee’s house and drove his cattled away. Inspired by the victory, Spence in 1775 wrote a lecture that he delivered before the Newcastle Philosophical Society, wherein he proposed the abolition of private property.”

P. 302 “the Spa Field Riots in England were led by Spenceans and waged by canal diggers, porters, coal and ballast heavers, soldiers, sailors, dockworkers and factory workers. Among the leaders was Thomas Preston, a Spencean who had travelled to the West Indies”

P. 305 Lord Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords (on February 27, 1812, when he was 24) was on a bill providing the death penalty for Luddites: “You call these men a mob,” he said, “desperate, dangerous and ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to quiet the ‘bellua multorum capitum’ is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads.’ He reminded the peers that those heads were capable of thought. Moreover, “it is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses – that man your navy, and recruit you army – that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair.”

P. 311 “By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, roughly a quarter of the Royal Navy was black, and the proportion was probably only a little smaller in both the English and American merchant shipping industries. John Jea, born in Calabar before being enslaved to a New Yorker, was himself working as a ship’s cook aboard the Isces of Liverpool when it was captured by the French in 1810. The black cook was so common as to become a stereotype in nautical fiction, reaching its apogee in Frederick Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy (1836). This figure, who was as important to pan-African communication in the age of sail as the sleeping-car powerer would be in the age of rail, carried the news of jubilee.”

P. 321 [Robert] “Wedderburn’s conception of the proletariat arose from the experiences of a life spent in the port cities of Kingston and London. James Kelley would write in 1838 that in Wedderburn’s native Jamaica ‘sailors and Negroes are ever on the most amicable terms.’// Everyone knew Tom Molyneux, the black American sailor and heavyweight boxing champion. Othellor was performed by African American sailors in Dartmoor Prison in 1814.”

P. 332 “The emphasis in modern labour history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlantic proletariat of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century. The proletariat was not a monster, it was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race. This class was anonymous, nameless… was self0active, creative; it was – and is – alive, it is onamove.”

P. 338 Thomas Hardy “On March 8, 1792, he wrote to the Reverend Thomas Bryant of Sheffield, ‘Hearing from Gustavus Vassa that you are a zealous friend for the Abolition of that accursed traffic denominated the Slave TRade I inferred from that that you was a friend to feedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am pretty perswaded that no Man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a White Man & vice versa.” Equiano opened for Hardy the doors to the steel and cutley workers of SHeffield. The Reverend Bryant led a congregation that would soon be labelled the ‘Tom Paine Methodists’ and many of its members were up in arms. In June 1791, 6,000 acres of land in Sheffield and its vicinity had been enclosed by an act of Parliament. The commoners, the colliers and the cutlers reacted in fury, releasing prisoners and burning a magistrate’s barn.. Jonathan Watkinson and the masters of the Culters Company calculated their compensation and decreed that 13 knives henceforth be counted to the dozen, since among the 12 ‘there might be a waste’… The people sang in protest:

The offspring of tyranny, baseness and pride,

Our rights hath invaded and almost destroyed,

May that man be banished who villainy screens:

Or sides with big W__n and his thirteens…

But justice repulsed him and set us all free,

Like bond-slaves of old in the year jubilee,

May those be transported or sent for marines

That works for the big W–n at his thirteens.”

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