Marcus Rediker > Quotes

“John Atkins, the naval surgeon, spoke of the transition from privateer to pirate as going from “plundering for others, to do it for themselves.”
― Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“Seamen could expect little relief from the law, whose purpose in the eighteenth-century Atlantic was, according to Jesse Lemisch, “to assure a ready supply of cheap, docile labor.”
― Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“It was on old joke among underfed, angry sailors that should mutiny fail, the weight of their bodies would not be enough to hang them.”
― Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“Job Bayley, facing death for piracy in a Charleston courtroom in 1718, was asked by the attorney general of South Carolina why he and his fellow freebooters fought Colonel William Rhett and the vessels sent by the government against them. Bayley probably brought a roar of laughter from those attending the trial when he answered, “We thought it had been a pirate.”
― Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“The year 1700 was a symbolic beginning of the drama in both Britain and America. Although merchants and sailors had long been involved in the trade, this was the year of the first recorded slaving voyage from Rhode Island, which would be the center of the American slave trade, and from Liverpool, which would be its British center and, by the end of the century, the center of the entire Atlantic trade. At the end of May 1700, the Eliza, Captain John Dunn, set sail from Liverpool for an unspecified destination in Africa and again to Barbados, where he delivered 180 slaves. In August, Nicholas Hilgrove captained the Thomas and John on a voyage from Newport, Rhode Island, to an unspecified destination in Africa and then to Barbados, where he and his sailors unloaded from their small vessel 71 captives. Hundreds of slavers would follow from these ports and from others in the coming century.10”
― Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History

“The slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness. Their legacy in the present is discrimination, deep poverty, structural inequality, and premature death.”
― Marcus Rediker

“why he and his fellow freebooters fought Colonel William Rhett and the vessels sent by the government against them. Bayley probably brought a roar of laughter from those attending the trial when he answered, “We thought it had been a pirate.”
― Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“The material chains of slavery and the global chain of commodities are linked.”
― Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom