University of Pittsburgh, 16-17 May 2025
2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Many-Headed Hydra: Slaves, Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000), by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Although focused on the early history of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book sought to provide the so-called anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s with a knowledge of its own long history, and to connect the rebels against neoliberal capitalism today with their ancestors struggling against European enclosures, African enslavement, and Native American genocide in the past. Yet despite its popularity with readers around the world (the book has been or will be translated into Arabic, Catalan, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish), and the resonance it has found in many activist communities (at least two anarchist bookstores have been named after it, in France and the UK), as well as among artists from San Francisco to Marseille to Cairo, the book has never received the serious scholarly attention it deserves. Published at a time when the field of Atlantic history was only just emerging, and a decade before the history of capitalism saw a resurgence in the US academy following the 2008 financial crisis, The Many-Headed Hydra was ahead of its time, and with its unapologetic partisanship for the dispossessed out of step with the mainstream of the historical profession.
This conference aims to bridge the gap between activists, artists, and scholars, and to critically assess the contributions of The Many-Headed Hydra in light of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles around the world, as well as scholarly and political debates on the history of global capitalism in the past twenty-five years. We do not want discussions to focus only on the book itself, but rather hope the conference will treat the concepts, themes, questions, and arguments it proposed as simply a starting point for debate. Peter and Marcus will attend and participate in the conference.
Core questions we hope to address include:
- To what extent are the arguments put forward in the book useful for understanding the history of resistance against capitalism beyond the Atlantic (e.g. in the greater Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, Oceania, Eurasia, the Americas, Africa and the African diaspora, or the world as a whole)?
- How do the historical processes depicted in the book resonate with contemporary social struggles around the world, including movements focused on extractivism and land-grabbing, free movement of people, commoning, coercive labor relations, social reproduction, militarized policing, mass incarceration, imperialist warfare, and more?
- What role has the evocation of monstrosity played in the history of class struggle? What myths, lore, literature, or art have sustained or reflected resistance to domination across the world?
- How do revolutionary movements spread? Through what channels do global movements from below communicate? In what languages do the heads of the Hydra speak, and what stories do they tell each other?
- How does solidarity among those afflicted by different axes of oppression come about? What are its conditioning factors and obstacles? What are its geographies; how does it connect town and countryside, colonies and metropoles, oceans and landmasses? How is it built and maintained, both in and beyond moments of immediate crisis and revolt?
- The Many-Headed Hydra advanced concepts such as “hydrarchy,” “motley crew,” and “the commons.” How might we develop these and other core concepts of the book further? What new concepts have emerged that can help us understand this history, including the recently reinvigorated framework of “racial capitalism”? How can history from below rethink concepts such as “agency” (E.P. Thompson) or “working-class self-activity” (C.L.R. James/George Rawick)?
Please send proposals for papers consisting of an abstract of 150-250 words plus a short CV by 1 September 2024 to manyheadedhydra2025@gmail.com. We especially welcome proposals from the Global South. Limited travel support will be available to support early career scholars and participants who cannot draw on institutional funding.
This conference is organized by the International Institute of Social History (IISH), VU Amsterdam’s interfaculty research institute CLUE+, and the History Department of the University of Pittsburgh.
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Niklas Frykman
Associate Professor of History
Director of Graduate Studies
University of Pittsburgh