Interview: David Glashan and Marcus Rediker, April 21, 2007, published in No Quarter: A Zine about Radical History (2008).

DG:  I was interested to note in your interview with Ready Steady Book your anecdote about reading Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down in the wake of the upheavals of the late sixties and making the connection between the radical ideas of the English Revolution and the radical ideas of the present. Could you comment about the connection between doing radical history or history from below and being engaged in social movements and everyday life in general.

MR:  Christopher Hill was one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, and one reason why was this: he believed, and could demonstrate, that people and events from centuries past were profoundly relevant to the present and future.  In this spirit he wrote The World Turned Upside Down, to show a younger generation (mine, of the late 60s/early 70s) that the ideas we thought we had invented were in fact very old.

In my view the struggle for a new future is always a struggle for new, more inclusive democratic and egalitarian ideas and practices.  The past can be very useful to us in this quest.  If we know how people have in the past tried to escape exploitation and oppression by organizing themselves and their lives differently, that might both inspire us and give us new ideas for our own times.

Speaking of pirates and the relationship between past and present, Roger Leisner of Radio Free Maine has sent me photos of recent anti-war demonstrations that have featured “Pirates for Peace” – people who dressed up as pirates to make their political demands.  And Tariq Ali, in his fine book Pirates of the Caribbean (which is about the progressive turn in Latin American politics) expresses his hope that “‘We are all Pirates’ becomes a regular chant on global justice marches.”

DG:  All of your books seem to be highly readable and accessible to a general audience at the same time as being scholarly and full of original research.  Is there a tension for you between writing books that are valuable to people in academia and books that are valuable to non-academics?

MR:  No, there is no tension, and I think I can thank my late grandfather, Fred Robertson, for that.  He was a Kentucky coal miner and story-teller extraordinaire.  At an early age I learned from him that the best and most powerful story was a human story, simply told and vividly illustrated.  I have tried to write history with this in mind.  I am happy that both scholarly and general readers have found my books of interest.  I guess mine might be a case in which Appalachian story-telling meets scholarly history from below.

I might add that most scholars could produce more popular books if they would simply understand that general readers are smart and thoughtful and capable of getting interested in complex, well-researched histories

DG:  What advice do you have for radicals outside of universities who want to learn about history?

MR:  My advice would be to read and learn as much as you can, individually and collectively.  Local and topical history reading groups are a great idea and indeed they have a long history among working people.  Online discussion groups can be useful too.

I would encourage people to check out what is going on in Bristol, England.  A group of people there came together outside the universities to form the Bristol Radical History group, which organizes discussions, lectures, and meetings to discuss the peoples’ history of their city – slavery and abolition, for example, and indeed all kinds of events and social movements, including riots and rebellions and labor history, women’s history, and black history.  Here is a link to their website: http://www.brh.org.uk/

They staged a Bristol Radical history week last October, which was a big success.  I like the democratic and participatory ways they are bringing history closer to peoples’s lives.

DG:  With an increased interest in pirates within popular culture do you see a corresponding increased interest in your work, or scholarship about pirates in general?

MR:  Every time a new pirate film comes out, the phone rings, again and again, without fail.   This was especially true after the appearance of both “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.   I must say, the popular appetite for pirates is insatiable.

The good news is that there is now more high-quality writing and thinking with which to satisfy it.  There are more good scholars working on pirates than ever before.  Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (1986) and C.R. Pennell’s Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader (2001) prove the point.

DG:  A somewhat related question: Why do you think there is such a divergence between media depictions of pirates and historical evidence?

MR:  Good question.  A significant part of the answer is that the film industry has, historically, drawn its images more from literature and popular culture than history.  The key text in this regard is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which did much to create a popular image, indeed a stereotype, of the pirate.  Because pirates now entered popular culture through children, films would appeal to long-nourished fantasy rather than historical fact.

I might add, I am now working with an L.A. film producer, Alessandro Camon, to produce the first realistic feature film about pirates, which will be an adaptation of my book, Villains of All Nations.  We’ll find out if a studio is interested in the real history of pirates as opposed to the Hollywood mythology.

DG:  I was very interested in your idea that piracy is not separate from, but rather part of the spectrum of rank and file militancy available to common sailors at that time. Could you comment on that.

MR:  The title of my first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, posed the sailor’s dilemma.  On the one side was the devil, the merchant ship captain, invested with the violent disciplinary power of a rising capitalist system, to be used against sailors in order to make the ships – and the Atlantic economy – run properly, that is, in the interests of the rich and the powerful.  On the other side was literally the deep blue sea, and caught in the deadly middle was the seafaring proletarian.  I wanted to study all available options of resistance, which turned out to be many and various: work stoppages, mutiny, desertion, strikes, and piracy.  The pirate ship was an alternative form of social organization for sailors, one that allowed them to live differently, more freely.  That vessel flying the black flag was, in many ways, the realization of a sailor’s dream.

DG:  In Villains of All  Nations there is a lot of information about the intersections between pirates and the slave trade.  On the one hand pirates often seemed to be the scourge of slave traders, sometimes freeing slaves when slave ships were captured, and often sailing with Africans in their crews, many of whom were likely escaped slaves. On the other hand pirates often seemed to regard the slaves on slave ships as cargo like any other.  What do you think accounts for this?

MR:  It’s hard to prove, but I suspect it had largely to do with a combination of ideology, circumstance, and skill.  Some pirates had no scruples about slave trading and engaged in it enthusiastically.  They tended to be based in the Indian Ocean, especially in and an around Madagascar.  A larger number of pirates seem to have been opposed to the slave trade, not least because they had worked in it and come to hate it.  These tended to be the Atlantic pirates of the late golden age (1710s and 1720s).

What any given pirate crew would do if they captured a ship with slaves would depend on how many there were, whether they (the pirates) needed crew members, and what kinds of skill the enslaved might have to offer.  If the enslaved had maritime skill, and a significant number did, or if they had special fighting skills (as warriors in their home societies), they would have been more likely to be incorporated into the pirate ship.  It is also worth remembering that a main principle of inclusion would be loyalty to the pirate group, which someone facing a (short) lifetime of slavery would develop very quickly when presented with the option.

DG:  Are you familiar with Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes, or Stephen Snelders’ The Devil’s Anarchy: The Sea Robberies of the Most Famous Pirate Claes G. Compaen & The Very Remarkable Travels of Jan Erasmus Reyning, Buccaneer, and if so do you have any comments about either book?

MR: Yes, I am, and my comment is, people should read them!

DG:  Could you recommend a book (or a few books) about pirates, and also a few books about other subjects?

MR:  A new book about pirates that might interest your readers is a collection of essays on pirate ships by nautical archaeologists, X Marks the Spot.  I would also recommend Joel Baer’s Pirates of the British Isles.

Among my favorites in history are Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, and C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins. 

As for poetry, I wold recommend anything by Dennis Brutus and Martín Espada, two who see and record the poetics of peoples’ struggles for justice. 

For readers of fiction I would recommend Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger; a brilliant novel of the slave trade, and Josephine Humphrey, Nowhere Else on Earth, a powerful account of race, class, and place in America.  I would also recommend anything and everything by the great proletarian writer B Traven, from The Death Ship to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

DG:  Can you tell us a little about your forthcoming book The Slave Ship: A Human History?