In the countries of the West there is a growing middle class, yet the gap between the haves and the have-nots at the economic extremes is ever-widening. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, militantly libertarian American academics, have written, in what they call "this black book of capitalism," an account of trans-Atlantic social change since the 17th century, from the point of view of the underdogs.
The authors raise questions about the justice of our system which may cause some twinges of inherited guilt, even in those beneficiaries most adamantly opposed to any alteration of the status quo. The most powerful men in England, up to the monarch, became vastly richer and more powerful by the clearance and confiscation of land and exploitation of the dispossessed as cheap or enslaved labourers. As Linebaugh and Rediker put it, "In the years 1600-1640, when capitalism began in England and spread through trade and colonisation around the Atlantic, systems of terror and sailing ships helped to expropriate the commoners of Africa, Ireland, England, Barbados and Virginia and set them to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water."
Governors and merchants regarded themselves collectively as Hercules confronted by the many-headed Hydra. Rulers, like the legendary hero, felt they had to keep cutting off the heads that threatened them. The proletariat's subversive heads, the book relates, included food rioters, heretics, army agitators, antinomians and "independent women", urban mobs, general strikers, rural barbarians, pirates and slave insurrectionists. Punitive and repressive reprisals, from whippings, exile and galley service to torture and execution, are catalogued in gruesome detail.
Linebaugh and Rediker properly devote a long chapter to "The Conspiracy of Edward and Catherine Despar", which exemplified the common cause of black emancipators and the United Irishmen. The United Irish song book, Paddy's Resource (1795), included The Captive Negro and The Negro's Complaint. A son of well-to-do parents with an estate within the Tudor Pale in what is now Co Laois, Despard served as an army officer in Jamaica, Nicaragua and Belize, rising to the rank of colonel - and marrying a black woman. Having turned against the establishment he became, in the words of James Connolly, "an Irish apostle of a world-w1de movement for liberty, equality and fraternity". In London, Despard's radical ideals cost him years in prison, and he made a passionate plea from the gallows for universal freedom.
English landlords and colonists treated even their compatriot workers with stringent severity. The Royal Navy was manned largely by men who sailed involuntarily. In the early years of the North American colonies, it was not unusual for those at the bottom of the hierarchy to defect to Indian tribes whose organisation was relatively democratic, with duties and food shared equally. When defectors were brought back they were hanged - if they were lucky. Others were tied to trees until they starved to death. When Indian raiders abducted colonial women and they were recaptured, some ran away to rejoin their abductors.
The authors' egalitarian bias may stimulate as much acclamation as Das Kapital, and provoke as much indignation. Conservatives may wish to remind them that capitalist competition in what is known as the free economy has done as much as wars to accelerate technological progress. But even men and women who feel privileged to live in the First World may read this book with sympathetic sighs as they consider their own enslavement by mortgages, car loans and credit cards.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic