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Too often, since every account must start somewhere, we only see the things which are new.¹

The last two chapters have sought to establish a new point of departure from which to reset the history of working-class internationalism in the longue durée of Atlantic capitalism.

Critically positioned within the relevant literatures of scholarship, as performed in Chapter 1, and equipped with a tuned-up, historical-materialist theoretical framework, articulated in Chapter 2, we now face a daunting question: where to start? The quickest, and indeed most direct, answer would be to go straight to what I consider the first most coherent and structured instance of transboundary collective actions by proletarian workers in the dark Atlantic—golden age piracy—before turning next to an account of what I consider to be the second instance in this historical development—the ‘Atlanticization’ of the Saint-Domingue revolution. In addition to rushing things along, pursuing such shortcut strategy would impoverish the historical structure of the argument itself. To be sure, inasmuch as I might try to contextualize and historicize the matter in a most concise way, I start in the 1710s and golden age pirates would appear as a spontaneous generational movement of radical sailors, whose ideas of organizing proletarian resistance across space and boundaries would therefore appear as new while, in fact, they had profound roots in earlier times. In the same vein, turning next to a study of the Saint-Domingue revolution would

1 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 27.

137 create the view that the insurgent slaves were revolting less for themselves than for the imported liberty-equality-fraternity slogan of the French Revolution.

Certainly, just like the context of the French Revolution played an important role in informing the slaves’ own revolutionary project, the struggle of golden age pirates was, too, shaped by new experiences, of which the most damaging, as we shall see later, was the intensification of the capitalist labour process at sea. But even if one excels in the art of summarizing historical backgrounds, this strategy would leave a crucial question unanswered: beyond new contextual openings for action, what cultural elements made these two instances possible? In the first case, one would immediately find the tradition of maritime democracy that came from the medieval age, wrapped up in the new language of dissent coming from the popular revolts—most especially from France and England—of the seventeenth century, but reformulated in its turn by its maritimization. In the second case, if determined to go beyond what a few leaders had to say about the black revolution, and focus instead on the movement of masses of insurgent slaves, one would necessarily see, as Cedric Robinson has argued, that ‘it was an African tradition that grounded collective resistance by Blacks to slavery and colonial imperialism’.² Therefore, in order to fully understand how these two traditions—one from Africa, one from Europe—came to be re-activated and acted upon in the new context of the dark Atlantic, and in a way that is consistent with our ambition to reset the genesis of working-class internationalism in a longue durée frame, a minimum of preliminary historical exploration is required. The scene, in short, must be set before the argument can be introduced and adequately deployed.

2 Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 169.

138 By way of prologue, then, this chapter sets out to recover and lay out an Atlantic repertoire of organizational and intellectual traditions of resistance that were carried out from Africa and Europe during the rise of Atlantic capitalism. In the manner of E. P.

Thompson seeking out pre-industrial traditions of plebeian oppositional culture in the first part of The Making, but in a manner more germane to a multi-disciplinarian only flirting with the methods of history from below, I want to track down and highlight how different cultural practices and worldviews came to shape and inform the experience of proletarian workers in their new experience of capitalist exploitation in the dark Atlantic. As I hope to demonstrate in this and the following chapters, the transformed continuity of these cultural practices and worldviews within, yet opposed to, the social order of the dark Atlantic tended to create relatively coherent ‘traditions of radicalism’, understood herein in the active sense of a continuous, yet always changing, organic development.

For the convenience of presentation, the narrative that follows is structured in terms of eventful sites. In the first section, I begin in the hinterland of the African continent and the slave-trade barracoons, before moving to the slave ship, the plantation, and finally the maroon community in the Americas. Here, I will foreground two interwoven features that shaped the construction of an African tradition of radicalism transcending these sites, namely, African military cultures and spiritual practices. Although the knowledge we have of these features remains partial and provisional, it is nonetheless illuminating of a profound and complex set of signifying practices and ideas that informed slave resistance in the dark Atlantic. This strand of black radicalism will later take us to revolutionary Saint-Domingue in 1791. In the second section of the chapter, I will visit insurgent commons and communes of Germany, France and England, at a moment where almost every corner of

139 Europe was swept by waves of popular revolts. Moving through these locales, I will highlight how they were interrelated by a common tradition of struggle rooted in egalitarian democratic communalism and Christian social radicalism. This tradition, as well shall see, was later transported beyond the Atlantic shores of Europe by the oceanic expansion of capitalism, which transformed and changed them along the way. There, we will see some of its elements being rearticulated on board the ships of the buccaneers—the first generation of pirates emerging in vivo in the Caribbean—who created their own independent communities which, for some times, challenged the emerging colonial social order. What had begun in revolt in Europe, as we shall see, was reshaped in the Caribbean so as to inform a new kind of revolt played out at sea.

It will be against these preliminary African and European backgrounds that my arguments on how transboundary proletarian solidarity eventuated in the dark Atlantic will unfold. In this chapter, I argue that, inasmuch as the early revolts and uprisings under study here happened in concomitance, sometimes transcending whole regions, they were rarely the result of premeditated, translocal political coordination. Though we can observe some clear ideological indications pointing in that direction, there were yet no meaningful and self-conscious efforts to organize localized revolts in broader, transboundary oppositional movements from below.

As such, this chapter will begin to lay out the idea that for this to happen, the deep-sea sailing ship was crucial as both a site of capitalist production and resistance. To be sure, the ship was first and foremost a vehicle that intrinsically entailed transboundary connections.

Emerging as a mobile locale of capitalist production in the sixteenth century (an aspect developed in the next chapter), the ship occupied a pivotal position in connecting together

140 the producers and consumers of the world through global market networks. This vehicular aspect, in turn, had implications for seafaring workers who entertained the idea of staging a shipboard revolt and taking possession of their floating workplace. The most important one, at least as far as this dissertation is concerned, was that the vehicularity of the ship created the possibility for insurgent sailors to make their own connections, and therefore broaden the basis of their revolt across space. A sailing ship under proletarian control, in other words, could become an extraordinary means of communication conducive to transboundary solidarity.

In the early modern Atlantic-world economy, the specific mobile feature of the sailing ship, I submit, placed seafaring workers in a much better position to initiate transboundary collective actions than slaves on plantations, where the work regime was far more oppressive, and where rebellion, as we shall see in this chapter, most often implied protecting the political autonomy gained in revolt rather than broadening it to other places.

Although there were some actions presaging self-conscious efforts to organize anti-slavery rebellion beyond original points of revolt, African slaves had to wait until the coming of the age of revolutions to link their movements into a broader, Atlantic-wide revolutionary project of black freedom. As we shall see in Chapter 7, the enslaved were the main instigators of age of revolutions, which they prompted in the United States in 1776 by their increasing insurgency. Fifty years before this event, insurgent proletarian sailors, black and white, had already managed to create a truly translocal form of maritime revolt, made possible by the movements of their self-appropriated ships. Because of this chronology, this chapter will take us there first.

141 Inevitably, constraints of space have not only led me to be highly selective in this chapter, but also to keep the flow of analysis relatively swift and at a certain distance from exhaustive detail. Moreover, as it is quite a challenge to thread together the pieces of this substantial history in a coherent narrative order without running the risk of oversimplifying, or worse ignoring, key events, and also because my aim here is only to set up a historical basis for subsequent chapters, the reader will, I hope, forgive me for being loose vis-à-vis the immediate concern of chronology, jumping, at times, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, or vice versa, when analysis makes it necessary or when evidence is needed. My intention, in a word, is not to construct a continuous, linear historical narrative, but, rather, to develop a punctuated account—one which grasps specific proletarian practices and legacies in their moments of insurgence. Because of this very precise and circumscribed objective, I will consciously ignore the internal limits and contradictions of the movements and struggles studied in this chapter. To begin with, such task, even partially performed, would take the chapter way beyond conventional length. But more importantly, what interests me here is not to provide a thorough and comprehensive analysis of those movements and struggles, but rather, and more modestly, to tease out tendencies in their developments about the idea of organizing proletarian solidarity across borders.

‘Cut off my head, I can’t be killed’: The African Stream of Radicalism

Lifting the curtain on the dawn of capitalist production, the Portuguese settlement in Madeira in 1415 was a world-historical turning point in the development of the dark Atlantic, for this venture led to the creation of the first true European colony committed to

142 near-sugarcane monoculture performed by African slaves, though not yet exclusively.³ From this moment on, gradually and with different intensity, we can observe the long, laborious and uncertain movement to increasingly tie sugar production to African slave labour, first down the Atlantic Coast of Africa—from the Canary islands (1436) to Cape Verde islands (1461) to São Tomé (1485)—before shifting across the ocean to Brazil (1530), and a about century later to the entire Caribbean region, where export-oriented, large-scale sugar plantations hinged on fully racialized systems of value-producing slave labour—at which we shall have a closer look in Chapter 5.⁴ This was, at a wide brush stroke, the structural context in and against which enslaved Africans revolted to regain their freedom in the dark Atlantic.

Hinterland and barracoon

The first act of this resistance was not played out on the plantations of the Americas but in and off the coast of Atlantic Africa, where it was directed against the transatlantic slave trade. If individual attempts to resist capture or to break away from the coffles in the interior were frequent among Africans, collective resistance to slave-traders by whole villages was, too, very common.⁵ Equiano, for example, writes that when a slave raid was expected in his former village, inhabitants would ‘…guard the avenue of their dwellings, by

3 On the development on the sugar industry in Madeira, see Sidney M. Greenfield, "Madeira and the Beginnings of the New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery: A Study in Institution Building," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (June, 1977), 536-552; and Alberto Vieira,

"Sugar Islands: The Sugar Economy of Madeira and the Canaries, 1450-1650," in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill & London: The

University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 42-84.

4 On this movement, see T. Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Philip D.

Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5 Richard Rathbone, "Some Thoughts on Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa," Slavery & Abolition 6,

no. 3 (1985), p. 13.

143 driving sticks into the ground, which are sharp at one end as to pierce the foot, and are generally dipt in poison’.⁶ This state of military preparedness caused by the dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade, he points out, transformed the African village into ‘a kind of militia’.⁷ As we shall see shortly, this knowledge and commitment to preserving freedom in Africa affected, along with the conditions of plantation slavery, slaves’ own assumptions of liberty in the Americas.

At other times, resistance to the slave trade moved beyond the village and took the form of genuine social movements, though these emerged less against the trade itself than against the deeper social harm in which the trade was implicated. Such a movement broke out in Kongo at the beginning of the eighteenth century, giving rise to ‘the most significant

“heretical” movement in early Kongolese Christianity’.⁸

In August 1704, a former nganga marinda (a traditional medium), a woman of modest origin named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was believed to have been resurrected from a deadly sickness as Saint Anthony—the patron saint of the lost people and objects canonized by the Church in 1232. The Saint had entered her body and commanded her to restore the Kingdom of Kongo and end the long-lasting and slave-producing civil war. He also communicated to Beatriz the real history of Christianity, one that the Capuchin missionaries were hiding from the Kongolese. She learned that Jesus did not come from Bethlehem but from M’banza Kongo, the capital. His baptism did not occur in Nazareth but in the northern Kongolese province of Nsundi. The Virgin Mary, in this version, was not

6 Equiano, Interesting Narrative, p. 53.

7 Ibid.

8 Terry Rey, "Ancestors, Saints, and Prophets in Kongo-Dominguois Root Experience: A Revisionist Reading of Transatlantic African Resistance," in Africa and the America: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, eds. José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France (Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press,

2005), p. 219.

144 only of Kongolese origin, but also the direct descendent of a slave woman. In other words, the Virgin Mary was now regarded as a Kongolese ancestor and, therefore, held up to cult veneration.

This Kongoized re-interpretation of the Nativity highlights a deep concern about race relations in early modern Kongo, and embodied a critique of the Catholic Church for the lack of black saints in its pantheon. Furthermore, because she conceived God’s worship as an inward matter tied to the pious intention of the believer, Beatriz came to reject Catholic sacramental rites, such as baptism, marriage, confession, etc. Christian piety was internalized and, accordingly, nothing should stand in the way between the believer and God. As such, Antonianism favored a new sense of individual empowerment, freedom, and spiritual equality in faith away from traditional clerical control. In advocating such a radical change in Christian piety, ‘Dona Beatriz had arrived at conclusions similar to Protestant thought by an entirely different route’.⁹ As we shall see below, Diggers, Ranters, and radical Levelers of mid-seventeenth century England were also claiming that each believer had a priest in his own conscience and that ‘God was no respecter of persons’, that is to say, of social status. At roughly the same time in Kongo, Beatriz’s preaching conveyed a comparable message in essence, but with a natural emphasis on race.

The majority of Beatriz’s followers were Kongolese peasants and commoners, who were the most affected by the civil wars created by the intensification of the slave trade in the region. Against royal factions competing for the throne of Kongo, Beatriz preached that the kingdom needed instead to reunite under a new benevolent king chosen by the people, one who would rule by consent of the governed. In this sense, the Antonian movement

9 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement,

1684-1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998b), p. 117.

145 embodied an early ‘republican-like’ political tendency that emphasized a popular conception of, and intervention in, Kongolese monarchism as a form of government. This is an important point to bear in mind, for it highlights that political leadership in Africa could be earned via some kind of election rather than passed on through inheritance. As Thornton has pointed out, ‘African states possessed a bewildering variety of constitutions: monarchs might be hereditary or elected, and they might exercise direct and fairly untrammeled power or be seriously checked by a variety of other institutions’.¹⁰ Experience of these systems of government were carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans and provided them, as they revolted against plantation servitude, with concrete political frameworks in which to realize their ideas of freedom in a new context. Interestingly, at the same time in Europe, most especially in France and England, a plebeian vision of monarchy with a tinge of republicanism was, too, percolating among the lower orders and put forward in several popular movements, as we shall see below.

The Antonian project of building a new political order from below looked dangerous to the Portuguese clergy and their elite Kongolese patrons. As one Italian Capuchin missionary complained, the popularity that Beatriz enjoyed made her de facto ‘the restorer, ruler and lord of Congo, and was acclaimed adored and esteemed as such by everyone’.¹¹ As a result, the movement began to be violently suppressed, ushering in an outright civil war. In 1706, Beatriz was caught and burned at the stake as a witch and heretic. But because of strong local organizations the Antonian movement could outlive the death of the mystic black prophet. Antonian warriors continued to defend their villages against the

10 John K. Thornton, "'I Am the Subject of the King of Congo': African Political Ideology and the Haitian

Revolution," Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (Fall, 1993), p. 187.

11 Cited in John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 109.

146 attacks of the king’s armies. In 1709, however, their resistance was crushed, and Antonianism defeated in Kongo. In an effort to rid the kingdom of the supporters of Dona Beatriz, King Pedro IV ended up exporting more than 30,000 of its subjects in the

146 attacks of the king’s armies. In 1709, however, their resistance was crushed, and Antonianism defeated in Kongo. In an effort to rid the kingdom of the supporters of Dona Beatriz, King Pedro IV ended up exporting more than 30,000 of its subjects in the