A fascinating investigation into the stories of the forgotten revolutionaries of the Atlantic.

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motely crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, labourers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would for ever change history. The Many-Headed Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.

"The Many-Headed Hydra is a wonderful book. Its passion and commitment encourages its readers to think associatively, to make progressive connections" - Guardian

"Scum of the maritime sort had their spell in the limelight with The Many-Headed Hydra. This compellting history of the 'revolutionary Atlantic' portrays pirates, sailors, dockers, sea-going whores and other dregs of the ocean and coast as briny rebels who resisted the global commercial order and even disrupted the slave trade for decades." - Independent

"Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, militantly libertarian academics, have written, in what they call this 'black book of capitalism', an account of trans-Atlantic social change since the seventeenth century, from the viewpoint of the underdog ... The authors' egalitarian bias may stimulate as much accumulation as Das Kapital." - Irish Times