Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Globalism is nothing new, argue leftist historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Centuries ago, European trade concerns, such as the Dutch East Indies Company and the Virginia Company, sought to create an overseas empire owned by corporations, not governments. Backed by governments all the same, these companies found themselves opposed only by a congeries of revolutionary sailors, artisans, farmers, and smallholders, who formed a “many-headed hydra” of resistance.
Arguing that this history of resistance to globalism has been unjustly overlooked, Linebaugh and Rediker delineate key episodes. When, for instance, a group of English sailors and common laborers were shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda en route to America, they created their own communal government, which was so pleasant to them that they refused to be “rescued” and had to be removed to the colonies by force. Their ideological descendants later banded with runaway slaves and other discontents to form multi-ethnic, multilingual pirate navies that hindered the transatlantic traffic in metals, jewels, and captive humans. Some of the men and women involved in these pirate bands, this “Atlantic proletariat,” put their skills at the service of the American Revolution, which, in the author’s view, “ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation, and citizenship to discipline, divide, and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement.” The fire of rebellion soon spread all the same, they note, to such places as Haiti, Ireland, France, even England, helped along by these peripatetic and unsung rebels.

Linebaugh and Rediker’s book is provocative and often brilliant, opening windows onto little-known episodes in world history. –Gregory McNamee –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Deriding the “historic invisibility” of their subjectsA”the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy”ALinebaugh (The London Hanged), professor of history at the University of Toledo, and Rediker (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea), associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, reveal that throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, mobile workers of all sortsAmaids, slaves, felons, pirates and indentured farm handsAformulated ideas about freedom and justice that would eventually find expression in the American Revolution. The moneymen thought of themselves as noble heirs to Hercules, “symbol of power and order,” and referred to the people they mobilized across continents as “hydra,” after Hercules’s many-headed foe. During these early days of intercontinental commerce, there were many small rebellions, and Linebaugh and Rediker’s book is especially valuable for its rich descriptions of the lesser-known revolts, including one by slaves in New Jersey who “conspired to kill their masters,” burn their property and make off with their horses in 1734, and another by Native American whalers who tried to torch Nantucket in 1738. The authors also describe the March 1736 “Red String Conspiracy”: 40 to 50 Irish felons, who planned to burn Savannah, kill all the white men and escape with a band of Indians (the conspirators wore red string around the right wrist to identify themselves). Their plot was foiled but caused great unrest in Savannah. This book provides a unique window onto early modern capitalist history. The authors are to be commended not only for recovering the voices of obscure folk, but also for connecting them to the overarching themes of the age of revolution. 50 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Commonwealth (Hardcover)
~ Michael Hardt (Author), Antonio Negri (Author)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Everyone seems to agree that our economic system is broken, yet the debate about alternatives remains oppressively narrow. Hardt and Negri explode this claustrophobic debate, taking readers to the deepest roots of our current crises and proposing radical, and deeply human, solutions. There has never been a better time for this book.
— —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine (20091001)

Commonwealth, last and richest of the Empire trilogy, is a powerful and ambitious reappropriation of the whole tradition of political theory for the Left. Clarifying Foucault’s ambiguous notion of biopower, deepening the authors’ own proposal for the notion of multitude, it offers an exhilarating summa of the forms and possibilities of resistance today. It is a politically as well as an intellectually invigorating achievement.
–Fredric Jameson, Duke University

Commonwealth [is] the latest book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose Empire and Multitude have, arguably, been the dominant works of political philosophy of the new century…[It’s] the much-anticipated final volume of the Empire trilogy. (Artforum )

Product Description
When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.

Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”

Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.

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Product Details
Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1 edition (October 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674035119
ISBN-13: 978-0674035119
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)