 Rwy'n meddych yn dda, i ddwy'n meddych i'r semenau o'r fathion effaith yw wedi'i gweithio'r gweithio'r transnational tern, ddim yn dda'r gweithio'r 18th dyn詩fyd yw'r gwirionedd Fyffredd. Rwy'n meddych i'r fathion yma, ac rwy'n meddych yn ei ddweud â'r sefydliadau, mae'n i ddweud yw'r gwirionedd Fyffredd ar yw'r newid yw'r bwch. y book about an 18th century prophet, philosopher, sailor, commoner, vegetarian, who became the first person ever to demand the total and unconditional emancipation of enslaved Africans around the world. Marcus Reddicka refers to him as the fearless Benjamin Lay, who acted on his ideals to create a new practical, revolutionary way of life, and he'll tell us about this, and Marcus will be talking about his new book yn y cwntechts y mynd i'r llwysoedd, ymddangos, a ysgolorsypa ymddangos ymddangos. Marcus Ruddaker yn ymddangos profiad yng nghymru at Y Unedig y Pilsberg ac yn y Rhyw Ymddangos Felly ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos yng Nghymru. Yn y cyfnod o'r llwysoedd cyngor ac yn ymddangos ym 15 ymddangos ymddangos, yn ymddangos gyda Peter Llymbr, ymdangos hydr, ymddangos, ymddangos, ymddangos cymryd, ymddangos cymryd, ymddangos cymryd, yng Nghymru. So, Marcus will speak for about 45 to 50 minutes. And then we'll hear from Paru Rahman, who will briefly discuss Marcus' presentation with some questions. And then we'll move to questions from the floor. And as always, the hashtags are so-assaded studies and ESRC. You can tweet, retweet, follow us and so on. And I will introduce Paru before she speaks. Thank you. Thank you, Faisi, for that generous introduction. Thanks also to Paru. It's wonderful to be back at SOAS, where my son was a student not too many years ago. I'm very happy to talk with you about this big theme, History from Below, after the transnational turn, the case of a forgotten 18th century revolutionary. So, let me begin with a brief genealogy of this phrase, History from Below. It was actually coined, as far as anyone can tell, by the great historian of the French Revolution, George LeFev, who in the 1930s talked about the need to write history, to understand history from below, on the perspective of ordinary working people who were usually left out of the older narratives that concentrated on great men. And as it happens, the 1930s was also the time when History from Below acquired its anthem. It has its own anthem, and that anthem is a poem by Bertolt Brecht, who said famously in a work called A Worker Reads History, the opening lines are, The Seven Gates of Thieves. The books are filled with the names of kings. But was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And so, Brecht goes on in the same vein throughout the poem, asking about the people who made the great men possible, who made the kings possible. And this phrase has been repeated again and again in the introduction to History from Below for a very long time. A second crucial chapter in The Rise of History from Below happened after World War II in a group called the Communist Party Historians Group here in Britain. And I must tell you that I suspect there was never a greater collection of historical talent in the same room as when Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobbesbaum, George Rude, Donna Tore, Morris Dobb, Dorothy Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Bridget Hill, Victor Cairnan, Rodney Hilton, and John Savill all met to discuss new ways of writing history. So here is Edward looking like a wild-eyed prophet. And here is Christopher looking like he's full of mischief, as in fact he frequently was. So I would like to remember and honour the specifically British contribution to the development of History from Below as a tendency. This group existed from roughly 1946 to 1956. This CP Historians Group tended to break down when a lot of people left the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Now, that's an important moment in the history of History from Below, but I think the crucial moment was the global 1960s and 70s, when a militant new left featuring a great many and varying movements from Below made new demands for history. And actually one of the first groups to do this was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, which demanded a new history that took race and slavery in America very seriously. But that of course was not the only movement that arose essentially to democratize the practice of history. We're talking about a fundamental debate over who is in history, who counts in history, whose story are we talking about. So this global new left I think was a very important part of the rise of history from Below. Other strands in this creative format, new currents in the labor movement created a new kind of labor history from Below. It concentrated not just on the labor leaders but the rank and file studying as many labor historians said the class itself from Below. And of course a third and major and in fact in some ways perhaps the most important movement to arise and to transform the demand for history was the women's movement, in which the more numerous part of humanity must now find a place in the telling of the stories of history, the rise of gender as a category of historical analysis. Jones Scott of course played a big part in that. And we could go on and on with a great many other tendencies, subaltern studies, the history of everyday life. It's sometimes called social history, it's sometimes called radical history, it's sometimes called people's history. But all of these things taken together I think constituted one of the greatest achievements of the new left. And you might call it actually a revolution in the way history was written. Now I want to concentrate today on a puzzle within this history from Below because we have a really interesting contradiction. A lot of this history from Below and Thompson and Hill were two of the greatest practitioners of it. A lot of this history was written by absolutely dedicated internationalists, but the history they wrote was in a national register. And this is kind of curious and we may want to get into the discussion of this a little later on. Why was Thompson's history and why was Hill's history so very English? Really interesting question. Robert had to do with their conception of what internationalism was, which depended upon nationally organized blocks of workers cooperating across national boundaries. But I want to emphasize there was another tradition of historical writing from Below that was not hampered in the same way by a national vision, and that tendency is the black radical tradition, especially emphasizing here CLR James, WEB Du Bois would be another figure, Eric Williams and of course a half generation later Walter Rodney. James, in writing The Black Jacobins, the great account of the Haitian Revolution in 1938, broke a lot of rules and showed the interdependence of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. He saw that this was an Atlantic story. Walter Rodney did similar things incorporating African history, as I'm sure I don't need to tell people at this university. In writing a book that Faisie mentioned, The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebow and I sought to connect the great strengths of history from Below in the English tradition to history from Below in the more internationalist black radical tradition. But now we're in a new situation. Now we have completed or half completed a linguistic turn, a cultural turn, and we have now a transnational turn in which almost all disciplines are beginning to use a much broader global frame of analysis. So one of my questions is, what happens to history from Below when the subjects of history are internationalized in this way? So at this time there is, right now, there is a lot of great history from Below being done, but in my view there is not nearly enough of it. I'll give you one example from a former student of mine just to illustrate the way in which national histories carved up history from Below. This is a person named Nicholas Frickman who is writing on the history of naval mutiny in the 1790s. Now this was a time of enormous explosion of popular resistance, and you could argue this was the biggest working class revolt of its time. But this thing has been divided up such that the French historians know only about the French naval mutinies. The British historians know only about the British naval mutinies. The Dutch historians know only about the Dutch naval mutinies, but these were all connected to each other because the seafaring proletariat was international, and the sailors circulated from one rebellious ship to another. So he is revealing in the course of his research a massive international revolutionary movement involving hundreds of thousands of people, something on the scale of the French and the Haitian revolutions, which are going on at the same time and revealing to us really an extraordinary moment of popular revolt. So that I think demonstrates one of the things that we can benefit from in thinking about history from Below beyond the nation state. So I want to now give another example based on this most recent book that I've written about a man who I'm going to suggest will be one of the most interesting people you've never heard of. May I ask how many people have actually heard of him, people who haven't heard about this new book? How many people have actually heard of this man called Benjamin Lay? Well, I'm going to try to change that. Here's how I want to introduce him to you. Benjamin Lay in the year 1738 went to a big meeting of hundreds of Quakers, Burlington, New Jersey. He prepared for this meeting by dressing not as he's dressed here, but dressing in a military uniform with a big sword buckled to his waist. Now this is strange because Quakers at this time and still today were all pacifists. So he dressed up as a soldier. And then he did something else. He took an animal bladder and he filled it with bright red pokeberry juice. And he tied it off. And then he took a book that had a secret compartment. You've seen those books? A little like a carved out square. He put the animal bladder in the book, closed the book, and he drew an overcoat so that nobody could see the uniform, the sword, or the book. So you've got to picture this. Hundreds of Quakers in the room. They do not have ministers by the way. People speak only as the spirit moves them. Are there any Quakers here? Any Quakers? Okay. So Benjamin Lay stands up to speak. Now I should say he didn't stand up very far about four feet tall. But he had a booming voice. And he stands up and he says, in a time when Quakers owned a lot of slaves. That's an important part of the story. Quakers owned slaves in this period. He stands up and he says, slave owning is the greatest sin in the world. And then he throws off the coat. And this gas fills the hall because he's dressed like a soldier. So he takes the book and he raises it above his head. He pulls out the sword and he says, God will take vengeance on those people who oppress their fellow creatures. And he runs the sword through the book and the blood comes gushing down his arm. And then he runs in the congregation and swindles the blood of the slave owners. And if you think you're surprised, imagine how they think. They were infuriated. So this man, for many, many years, practiced this kind of guerrilla theatre in order to dramatize the evils of slavery. He was one of the first to demand the total abolition of slavery worldwide. He was an abolitionist beginning in 1718, really a good 70 years before an abolition movement developed. He was way ahead of his time and he would pay for that. And he had a tremendous impact among the Quakers who will become the first group to outlaw slavery in their own midst. The first one really in modern history to do that. You could not be a Quaker and own a slave by 1776. So what I want to talk about for the remainder of this meeting is how Benjamin Lay helps us to understand abolition in a new way. We want to understand abolition from below, right? History from below, abolition from below. And I do want to emphasize one point. Let me tell you how I discovered Benjamin Lay. It happened when Peter Lionbaugh and I were writing the many-headed Hydra and we were studying these cycles of rebellion in the Atlantic. About every 30 years, the 1690s, 1730s, 1760s, 1790s, 1830s, there would be these intensified moments of resistance. Frequently they were slave revolts, but they also could be military strikes. They could be what factory workers do when they go out on strike. They could be naval mutinies, but there are these intensified moments so in the 1730s we wanted to see if this really extraordinary wave of slave revolts produced any new breakthroughs in anti-slavery thought. And as it happens, Benjamin Lay was a product of that uprising because he published his book All Slave Keepers Apostates in the year 1738 very much conscious of this wave of slave revolt. So when he takes this sword and runs it through the book, there's an ominous double meaning, folks. It's not just God is going to take vengeance. It means there are slave revolts everywhere and this is a crucial moment. This is the time to abolish slavery. That's the answer. So here's what I want to ask about him in the remaining time. Two questions. First of all, how did he make this breakthrough to argue for abolition? In other words, the overwhelming majority of people from Europe who went to the Americas made peace with slavery one way or another. But this guy didn't. He did not. So how did he break through? So that's the main question. And the second question I want to ask is, why is he almost completely unknown? How did that happen? Part of it is nationalist history. Okay, so what I want to do is give you a brief outline of Benjamin Lay's life, followed by what I consider to be the elements of his radicalism. A geographically diverse set of influences that he combined, the combination of which allowed him to break through and see that slavery had to be abolished immediately. Okay? So, let's begin with a survey of his life. Benjamin Lay was born into a humble Quaker family in Copford, England, just a little north of Colchester, not very far from here, about 60, 70 miles from here. He was, as a youth, he worked as a shepherd. His labor history is actually very important to the development of his ideas. He was trained to be a glove maker, was a very low dirty craft, one he always hated working with dead animal skins. And crucially, for a very significant part of his life, he went away to London and became a deep-sea sailor, sailing around the world. This is a very important thing in his life, this experience of being a sailor. He married a woman named Sarah Lay in 1718. She, too, was a little person. She, too, was an abolitionist. We don't know nearly enough about her. And they then moved to Barbados. Apparently, without really understanding exactly what Barbados society was like, because what it was like is, this was the leading slave society in the world. So he goes to Barbados. He opens a little shop on the waterfront, selling oranges and dry goods to sailors, but also crucially to a lot of enslaved people who come into the port on market day, on Sunday, and he really comes face-to-face with slavery, the truly violent, horrific reality of slavery. He stays there only about 18 months. He's actually forced off the island by the sugar planters, the ruling class. I'll explain why in a minute. He goes back to London. He goes back to Colchester. He gets into all kinds of fights with the Quaker communities there. He was a very difficult man. And finally, he and his wife decide to immigrate to Philadelphia in 1732. In 1738, he publishes this book. All slavekeepers that keep the innocent in bondage apostates. Now, folks, this is a really strange book. It's cited by historians of abolition, but I'm convinced that almost none of them have actually read it. And one reason why is because it's a really hard book to read. It's full of this really dense biblical exegesis in which he is using the Bible to criticize slavery. But he also, partly because he never actually learned the conventions of writing a book, he never had much education. He was almost entirely self-taught. I suspect that he was really taught to read by his fellow sailors at sea. He paid no attention to the conventions of book writing, so he copied down, for example, things he was reading. And then he would tell you what he thought about what he was reading. So it's like an annotated bibliography, which is a very useful thing for his story to have. And he copied into this autobiographical fragments, talking, for example, about his time in Barbados and what happened to him there. So anyway, this book is a big attack on the rich slave owning Quakers. One story about its publication. When Lay finished the book, he had this box of papers and he took them to Philadelphia. He was living just outside the city then. He took them to a man named Benjamin Franklin, whom you have heard, I suppose, the founding father of the United States, a great scientist and a figure of the Enlightenment. And Benjamin Franklin takes one look at this disordered mass of papers and says, what am I supposed to do with this? And Benjamin Lay says, I don't care. Print it in whatever order you want. And he did. But he also did one notable thing. Those of you who know 18th century publications will know that on the title page, it always says, printed for the author by Benjamin Franklin, printer. Benjamin Franklin left his name out of this because he knew it was going to cause an explosion. And it did. The wealthy Quakers were absolutely furious. Okay, so just to finish with the life story, Benjamin was disowned by the Quaker elite. He was disowned four times by four different Quaker congregations. He was probably the most disowned Quaker of the 18th century. He died in 1759 at the age of 77. And before he died, thanks in large part to his activism, the Quakers took the first big step towards abolition, saying that any Quaker who was involved in the slave trade could be disciplined or disowned. That was the first big step. When Benjamin Lay heard the news, he knew this was the beginning of the end. And when someone told him the news, he said, I can die in peace. It's going to happen now. He was right. Okay, so this basically is the outline of his life. Now go to four basic radical traditions that Benjamin Lay combined in order to break through to a new understanding of the world. And I should say, Lay was not only an abolitionist. He had a whole set of ideas, very radical ideas for his time. And even for ours, he was also a vegetarian. He was a champion of animal rights. All the people think this is a very modern thing. He was the first person ever to refuse to consume any item produced by slave labor. So the politics of consumption really began with Benjamin Lay. The global anti-switch shop movement is based on this idea that you must understand. He said about 130 years before Karl Marx, the commodity hides the secrets of its own production. And Benjamin Lay said, that cube of sugar that you drop into with your tea, that sugar is made with blood. The blood of enslaved people in Barbados and Jamaica. And I have seen it all with my own eyes. So anyway, he puts several radical traditions together to have this quite integrated world view. Okay, so what's the first of these traditions? The first is something that goes back to the English Revolution. One of the arguments of the book is that Benjamin Lay is actually the last radical of the English Revolution. 1640s and 1650s, that comes to an end with the return of King Charles, the second in 1660. This battle between round heads and cavaliers, parliamentarians, and royalists, it becomes a war. In that period, royal censorship breaks down. And all these radical groups, levelers, diggers, seekers, muggletonians, ranters, and crucially Quakers, rush through the open breach, publishing a very radical set of ideas. This is the world turned upside down that Christopher Hill wrote about, radical ideas during the English Revolution. But the key point here is that the Quakers were part of it. Now, the Quakers in those days, especially in the 1650s, were really wild. Now, they're so respectable these days, right? So respectable in so middle class. But back in the 1650s, they did some wild shit. I want to tell you. I'm like, for example, one man, one Quaker, runs through Parliament naked with some burning brimstone on his head. Another Quaker will step out on the corner and casually set the Bible on fire. Which is really the ultimate blasphemy. The point was, this is a human creation. Real divinity lies within the individual. The inward light, as the Quakers call it. So they had this kind of antinomian radicalism. Antinomian is a hard word, but let me explain it. It's basically the belief that you break it down. Anti means against, and the root word of nomian is nomos in the Greek, which means the law, authority, social order. So an antinomian is someone who feels that he or she is not bound by the law. They are free to do whatever they think is godly. Because they have a direct relationship to God and no minister can tell them what to do. This folks is a very radical idea. And the Quakers were full of it. This idea is central to early Quakerism, especially a man named James Naylor, who I think was an important person for Benjamin Lay. James Naylor re-enacted the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey with a group of radical women throwing flowers in his way and singing Hosannas, for which James Naylor was punished by Parliament, having his tongue bored by a hot metal iron, having his forehead branded with a bee for blasphemer, and having been flogged at the back of a cart by the hangman, all over Bristol and all over London. Because this man was such a dangerous radical, the officials really went after him. He actually died a broken man, never having recovered from this extreme punishment. At that point George Fox, who is known as the Founding Father of Quakerism, essentially took over a movement in which he had been a co-leader with Naylor, and he then set about stamping out the more radical side of Quakerism that Naylor represented. Naylor was the sort of anti-nomian part of it. One of Naylor's protegees was a man named John Perot. You might know that one of the radical things Quakers did in this day was when they met a gentleman, somewhat of higher social standing, they refused to take off their cap. They refused what was called hat honour. John Perot, this radical anti-nomian Quaker, took this idea to its logical extreme, explaining that Quakers should not really even bother taking off their hats when they pray to God. Because God is within them and everybody is equal, so what does it matter? This drove George Fox mad that this sort of persistence of this radical idea was there. Fox then set about organizing a series of reforms within the Quaker faith, the main purpose of which was to eliminate radicals like James Naylor and John Perot. And I'm here to tell you that Benjamin Lay was the reincarnation of that radical Quakerism, a good generation and a half later. How he actually came to know all these things is a very interesting question. I talk about some of it has to do with the history of radical religion in his native Essex, specific networks of people. But Benjamin Lay kept his hat on when he didn't approve of the Quaker who was preaching. He performed this extravagant street theatre, an example that I've already given you, and he embodied this radical Quakerism which was really the core of his being. This is the core. But it's not enough to break through to anti-slavery and all of these other radical ideas. So we come now to a second radical tradition. One of the things that Peter Limbaugh and I talked about in the Many Head Hydra is that there was in the 17th and 18th century a specifically maritime kind of radicalism. The collectivism and the anti-authoritarianism of sailors. This was something that Lay imbibed as he worked on deep sea sailing ships from about 1700, 1701 to around 1713, 1714. But here's what you need to know. Even though he left off to sea, as a lot of sailors did because it was such a hard line of work, his identity remained that of a common sailor his entire life. In fact, in writing his book, at the end of the book when he apologizes for the fact that it's not written in the style of a truly educated person, he says, what would you expect from a poor, illiterate common sailor? Okay, so here's how his seafaring experience matters. Because he tells us so. It was sailor's yarns, sailor's stories at sea that first educated Benjamin Lay about the slave trade and about slavery. Anytime you get 40 men on board a ship for a long voyage, the different experiences those people have had, they have been everywhere and Benjamin talked to people who had been on slave ships. And he heard stories of the extreme violence used against women. He was very moved by these. He also heard stories of European sailors who had been enslaved in North Africa and in Turkey. This was not an uncommon thing in this period. So the sailor's yarn is this international means of communication. But that's not all he got. One of the two most important things Lay got was the cosmopolitanism of being a sailor. Sailors were the most cosmopolitan people in the world in the 18th century because they had been all around the world and it's a very important part of Lay's authority as a writer to say, I know mankind in all nations, all colours and all countries of the world and therefore I have the authority to tell you why slavery is wrong. He also recognized the realities of the slave trade in one part of his book and this is really a chilling part of it. He speaks directly to Quaker slave traders and he says to them, you! You have killed a lot of people in the slave trade. He knew that premature death was a part of the slave trade and he said, you might have killed thousands of people. In fact, and here he grasped the magnitude, he said, you might have killed hundreds of thousands of people. And if you look at that moment when he made that statement at the transatlantic slave trade database, you will find that 500,000 Africans had already died in the slave trade. And here's what he said about that. He says, that's a crime. That is a crime. You are all murderers. Now this is interesting because to say something is a sin is one thing, to say it's a crime is something different because that means there should now be justice done. So his experience as a sailor helped him to see all this and then there's one last thing that it really helped him to do. Sailors had a work culture that was based on solidarity. The reason being it's a really dangerous work environment. Sailors put their lives in each other's hands every single day and they develop really strong bonds. Well, the creativity of Benjamin Lay was to take that idea of solidarity and to apply it beyond sailors to other people who worked in really difficult circumstances, including especially the enslaved people he would meet in Barbados. So this maritime radicalism, Quaker radicalism, maritime radicalism and now we're going to get to the third influence, Afro Barbadian radicalism, the struggle against slavery in Barbados. Lay goes to Barbados in 1718, opens that little shop on the waterfront and here he writes in language that is almost hallucinogenic what slavery actually looked like when starving people with their gaunt ribs walk into your shop and beg for some food or when you see someone who dared to run away from slavery tortured to death. Or when you see people in these sugar works, these industrial sugar works, get their hands or fingers caught in the machinery, body parts actually end up in the sugar vat. This is why literally sugar is made with blood. Benjamin Lay sees all this and he befriends a lot of the African peoples on the waterfront. He has a very sympathetic reaction. He begins to feed the hungry. He and his wife Sarah and they begin to hold meetings in their very tiny house and the word gets out among enslaved people and hundreds of people begin to show up for these meals and these meetings and of course at those meetings Benjamin and Sarah denounce the source of the misery that all these people are experiencing and of course the word of this gets out to the big sugar planters so they send people to break Benjamin's windows or overturn the shells of the things where he's selling. He's harassed by the big planters because he has crossed a race line and is demanding the end to slavery. The planters actually force him off the island but he and Sarah already had their own reasons for going. I'll just tell you one story about Sarah's experience. She went to visit a Quaker in a place a little bit north of Bridgetown where their shop was and when she arrived at the plantation home she found an African man suspended by a chain shivering with a big pool of blood below his body and Sarah Lay as Benjamin said was a very tender hearted person and she was really profoundly disturbed by this, struck dumb actually is what he said she just stood there in horror and she went inside and asked to the Quaker family and they explained that this man had run away from the plantation and now a lesson must be taught. So Benjamin and Sarah decide to leave Barbados but not before a very radical transformation during this 18 months they both become committed abolitionists. So this is the third kind of radicalism. The radicalism that arises from the daily struggle against slavery. And then there is a fourth kind of radicalism and this is the radicalism of the commons. Benjamin grew up as a commoner in Essex and he actually applied the lessons and the practices of commoning to building a new way of life outside Philadelphia in a little town called Abington. Benjamin and Sarah moved into a cave. They made all of their own food and made all of their own clothes. You know why? They wanted to live as Benjamin put it on the innocent fruits of the earth and by that he meant we want to live with no human exploitation and no animal. And the only way to do that is to make everything yourself. So he actually withdrew from the capitalist market economy because he saw that commodities, this included tea by the way, he knew that plantation workers in India lived in a state of near slavery if not actual slavery so he wouldn't drink tea either. There's another commodity that hid its origins. So he developed really a revolutionary way of life. Now within this commoning attitude I discovered a really surprising and unexpected source. As it turns out Benjamin Lay, oh I should just show you, see here are some symbols of his vegetarianism. We've got a melon, squash, pears, apples and right here Benjamin's favorite food, turnips. He drank only water, occasionally milk and he was essentially, except for the milk, a vegan 200 years before the word was invented. Okay? Okay, so I found this really unusual source. As it turns out Benjamin Lay was a serious student of ancient philosophy and he was especially interested in the philosophy of a school called the cynics represented by none other than Diogenes who is really one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. The cynics had a set of ideals but the main ideal for which they were known was called Parisia by which is meant essentially speaking truth to power in all circumstances. You must always do this. Diogenes was actually very well known for this but Diogenes was also a vegetarian. He walked wherever he went. He scorned rich people every opportunity he got. He was full of wit, he was full of verbal jousting, sharp conversation. He invented the word cosmopolitan by the way. Someone said, oh you're a citizen of the great Greek city state of Athens. Someone said, I most certainly am not. I am a citizen of the cosmos. I am a cosmopolitan. That's the beginning of that word. If you go back and forth, look, here he is. Here is Diogenes with his walking cane. There is Benjamin with his walking cane. Benjamin wore a beard which is very unusual among the Quakers and so on and so on. Benjamin Lay was the Quaker Diogenes. Always speaking truth. To conclude, Benjamin Lay made this breakthrough by combining Quaker, Maritime, Afro Barbadian and common radicalism. The combination of those things was really crucial. Any one of them wasn't enough in most cases. So why have we not been able to see it? Why is he totally unknown? There are several reasons. One is that the nature of his life in which he took the Quaker radicalism from England, the Afro Barbadian radicalism from that island society, a common radicalism from England and North America, and a seafaring radicalism from the high seas. We've always been inclined to break people up. You can't understand Benjamin Lay unless you understand all of these things in tandem simultaneously within the same life story. So there is a geographic-slash-nationalist division which we need to reject. But that's not all of the story. Quakers themselves bear part of the blame for Benjamin Lay being unknown because he suffered fierce repression in his own day. All these disownments, the effort to kind of keep him out of the Quaker Church, the Quakers have a lot to answer for. I have been speaking at Quaker congregations in the United States and my plea is always exactly the same. Re in State Benjamin Lay, you kicked him out, you bring him back because you know he was right. Slave owners didn't know it at the time, but they know it now, don't you? This has actually produced a very interesting debate. But it doesn't stop there. Historians of abolition have also played a major role in silencing or causing us to forget Benjamin Lay because he doesn't fit the story of abolition that we've been told for so long. Abolition was basically the work of middle-class and upper-class white men who were all enlightened, right? Wrong. If enslaved people are the first abolitionists and they definitely are, and if they acquire allies like Benjamin Lay as they definitely did, we need to understand abolitionism from below. And I also want to point out that Benjamin was marginalized partly because of his body, partly because of the qualities of his mind. He was so extreme and so radical. The most famous historian of abolitionism, David Brian Davis, called him a demented little hunchback. Can you imagine a more marginalizing phrase than that? What does that tell you? Don't pay any attention to this guy. But it turns out he was extremely important. I have argued in the book that Benjamin Lay went through a process of enlightenment from below. There is another enlightenment from below in which working people come to grips with certain kinds of international experience. So here's the final thing I want to say. Benjamin Lay is important for another reason. As the last radical of the English Revolution, he actually attaches the revolutionary ideas of the middle of the 17th century to the radical ideas of the age of revolution, which will come in the later 18th century. And sometimes, folks, in the course of research, you just get lucky. I had this hypothesis about Benjamin Lay and I discovered in a very obscure archive a book that was part of his library. You know, he lived in this cave and he had a library of 200 volumes in there. Kind of hard to imagine, but in this book, in the Germantown Pennsylvania Historical Institute, Historical Society, you open the first page and in a big, bold hand, it says, this book belongs to Benjamin Lay. Well, what is the book? It's a book by one of the leading radicals of the English Revolution named William Dell, who was a seeker. It's a series of sermons that he gave and they're very radical sermons. And then comes the moment of truth. You open the next page and the next and they're full of Benjamin Lay's marginal comments. And you actually see him having a conversation with a radical of an earlier time and incorporating those ideas into his radicalism in the later 18th century. So that is what I want you to understand about Benjamin Lay, that he is an unusual person and we need to remember him. Thank you very much. I forgot one image. Just in the past month or so, so this book has come out, there's a new organization called the Benjamin Lay Society that's been formed in Philadelphia. That's City Hall in Philadelphia, which has a statue of William Penn. But William Penn was a slave owner. He owned 12 slaves and so the Benjamin Lay Society has one demand and that is take down William Penn and put Benjamin Lay up on top of City Hall. Okay, thank you for that, Marcus. We're now going to hear from Haru Rahman and I'll just introduce her. Haru is an anthropologist and a historian here at SOAS and her research focuses on the South Asian diaspora in both historical and contemporary contexts. And she's also interested in the emergence of diasporic consciousness and forms of political subjectivity amongst diverse South Asian migrant populations primarily in South Africa and post-war Britain. And she's been the director of studies of the MA in migration and diaspora studies and she also initiated the and became the chair of the SOAS Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies. So thank you for coming and discussing this for a few minutes and then we'll open it up to the floor for questions. Yeah, absolutely. And I know what's on your thinking. I thought she'd left. And I kind of have, but I'm sort of leaving SOAS style-y, you know what that means. I'll probably be still being pushed into my wheelchair when I'm 90s as doing something with the others because it's the next stop. But the reason I agreed to Faze's invitation was because Marcus Reddica and his workers had a really big influence on my own academic work, the way I teach, the way I view history and the way I sort of hope my students are encouraged to see history. So it's a great pleasure to be here. And what I really like about the work is this global perspective that transcends national borders because I think national borders are very dangerous and they depict history and I wanted to ask Marcus a question about that in a minute. But also about how you always use a little story and I think that's precisely what you've done today with this very rich biography of Benjamin Mayer, a little story to illustrate a bigger story. And the bigger story is always the violence of capitalism as it's emerging as a system. And the little story is one of resistance. But that resistance in a sense also illustrates what's happening on the wider sense. And I think this does that very effectively. And it is also, of course, the way you look to an alternative storytelling and maybe we could start with that in a way, a storytelling which brings to light other voices, so it's not the voices of traditional people who are supposed to have shaped history, but it is if you like what we could call the excess of society, sailors, slaves, indentured workers, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe because you're talking about methods, could you talk a little bit about storytelling and the importance of that to your historically and how you use that to actually tell a different type of history? Yes, thank you. It's a really good question, Paru, and I must say it took me a long time to figure out how I came to understand storytelling. The key in my case was my grandfather who was a Kentucky coal miner and a master storyteller. In the Appalachian tradition. He used to say exactly what you just said. He says, a good storyteller always uses a little story to tell a big story. There are always multiple levels of every story, and he also used to say, every story has to tell you something practical, something you can use. And in my storytelling, it's always about resistance. But I think, of course, sailors had their own storytelling tradition, and I would recommend to everybody a wonderful essay by Walter Benjamin called The Storyteller. And he says basically there are two different kinds of storytellers. There are peasant storytellers, or basically people who have a deep knowledge of local lore, and then there are sailor storytellers who always tell a story that's come from afar. And he then talks about these two types and how they work over time, and both are related to different kinds of working class knowledge. So I guess it took me a while to recognize the depth of the influence that my grandfather had, but I'm very grateful. And he always also said, it has to be a story in which people can recognize themselves in some way. It has to be a human story. And I think that this reminds me of something George Rawwick, the great historian of slavery and close associate of CLR James once said, he said, if you're writing history for people who want to make change, if they can't recognize themselves in the story in some way, you failed. And so you must tell deeply human stories. OK, thank you. I then wanted to go on to talk a little bit about this notion of history from below. And I wanted to look at the interface or the interaction between race and class in particular, because you mentioned quite rightly Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson. And I was really relieved, actually, when you then brought in Du Bois, CLR James, Walter Rodney, because, of course, you can't really understand history from below, unless those guys are part of the story. Du Bois, for example, his idea of the Negro was a truly global subject, partly because they had migrant subjectivities themselves that enabled them to see the world in a certain way. And I think you quite rightly said one of the sort of failures of Thompson and Hill, to some extent, but other historians are also members of the history around that time was they kept within a nationalist framework. So I'm going to ask you what do you think about, at that point, there's also what we were seeing was, and this is going to go on for some time, but also the emergence of an international working class, which is making itself white during that time as well. So it's not very easy question, but I wanted to talk a little bit about Hill, Thompson, getting stuck in a national history and how that relates to race and class as it was going on in that period in the 30s. That's a good question. It's hard to know. I have actually had discussions with both, I had discussions with both Thompson and Hill about it. I think their idea was that national culture or nationality was a defining aspect of culture and therefore of politics. So Peter Linebaugh always actually said something very interesting. He would say, what we need to understand is not the making of the English working class, we need to understand the making of the working class in England. And that very slight switch of language opens up the conversation to Irish, African, Indian workers of many different kinds. Why that generation had a particular understanding of national culture is kind of hard to say, but I think it was probably part of the CP inheritance and the way that blocks of workers were organized internationally through either unions or national unions or other sorts of organization that the emphasis was never really on international experience because it was very odd because Hill and Thompson were both very interested in experience but this was kind of a blind spot. So I think that was and I think they never really understood the challenge that was made by Black Power put it that way. Thompson did have some discussions with CLR James. There's one story in particular that he told. This was when James was quite elderly and there was a crowded room and Thompson was just the first person at the edge of the door and during the Q&A Thompson asked a question and CLR James answered I wish my friend Edward Thompson were here to answer that question. He couldn't see him. And of course everybody laughed and James himself laughed as much as anybody but in my view the problem wasn't that James couldn't see Thompson. It was that Thompson couldn't hear James. And it is noted in Eric Hobsbaum's memoir or kind of short article about the CP Historians group that they explicitly decided not to read James because of the authors known Trotskyism. And so they cut themselves off from that sort of an issue. I think that the study of race in class has actually been much more advanced in the US where the movements actually forced that issue on to the agenda. Yeah, absolutely. Our phase is getting anxious. You know the discussions always it's the malaise isn't it? You think oh my god, am I going to think of a question to rise and then you've got hundreds of questions but maybe we could discuss that a bit more later on because it's quite interesting work come out of South African historians about the international working class and the creation of whiteness and how that's related to the British Labour movement but that's later. So I just finished with a very well, I was just intrigued. It was almost like a sort of you just tossed aside the fact that Benjamin Lay and Sarah went to Barbados and I thought that seemed quite interesting. Could you maybe say just a few more? Well okay yeah, the thing I should have said in which I talk about in the book they basically ran away to Barbados because Benjamin was having a lot of trouble fighting with all the Quaker congregations that he was a member of. He was not only concerned about slavery he was also concerned about what he called false prophets and what he meant by a false prophet was someone who was not preaching according to some inward feeling of holiness but was basically speaking their own words as he put it and the words of ego. So he had a very common habit of denouncing Quaker ministers and the Quaker congregations didn't like it. He would stand up and say that or he might put his hat on to say I'm not paying any attention to what this person says. So the decision to leave England was I think forced by conflict that was created by his quite confrontational personality why he picked Barbados I don't know. Because what makes it more interesting is that as a sailor he should have known something about it and secondly he seems to have been completely surprised by what it was once he got there. So I guess there are limits to his cosmopolitan knowledge but he had a habit of doing what sailors often did when certain conflicts arose they ran away used mobility as a strategy of resistance. Very sensible. So I think we're going to open up questions now. So we'll take it. So my question is I do like that how you're describing Benjamin Lay as being more as an ally and that he took on the role of what I think a lot of people who are of colour tell white folks to do is go do your own work in your own community and not try to come and be the hero in ours we don't need you to be in our communities doing this work. But in the search of wanting to make sure to hear about the history from below even with Benjamin Lay being somebody that we've never heard of how is it as we continue in this process of doing this where we don't centre whiteness in ways that we do that because it's not to say that Benjamin Lay's story it's not something that we want to hear but it still gives the residents of like this is another way of how history centred whiteness and all of that. So in that it's appreciative of him having a grasp of understanding of him taking on a personal role and going to actually have an analysis of capitalism and I'm going to call my very people you know to task for this versus what I think a lot of white people do is that they want to become scholars of it and just regurgitate the work but never really be accountable for the actual things that go on in their own communities but it's still centred around whiteness though. Right. Shall we take three questions OK. Actually I feel comfortable asking my question after this is it OK if like he actually answers this one first I think it's really important. OK. Yeah sure we can do that. Do you want to answer this one and then we'll take a couple. Yeah let me I would say there's several different ways to approach your question. First of all Benjamin Lay is not a white saviour this is very important point you are right he felt that the most important thing he could do was to organize his own religious community right but he also justified and legitimated all kinds of resistance and that was an unusual thing for someone like him to have done in that time period so I think we have to acknowledge that a second thing is that he it's really quite fascinating to me he refused to play the game of race in this sense race as a concept at this very moment in the early 18th century is dividing up humanity Benjamin Lay never talks about race it's almost like he recognized that it was a trap what he talks about is color different cultures different nations different peoples but he has a rather different view he's not and he basically talks about what he considers to be the bright genius of African peoples so he's just and this is based on his knowledge of people so I think we have to see that he's one of the things Benjamin Lay is doing is trying to he's taking a kind of anti racializing strategy in his writing and his activity so that for all the people who consider race to be a matter of different species of humanity Benjamin Lay answers that with the bible who says all people are of one blood so you've got to see him in relation to these debates of the time and I think that's important in terms of how I see Benjamin Lay you have to put his story in the context of other histories that I've written and especially the many headed Hydra and especially the slave ship and the Amistad Rebellion in the Amistad Rebellion I really worked hard to create a different view of the abolitionist movement putting African insurrectionists at the heart of it that the Amistad Rebells themselves were they ended up after having captured the slave schooner in 1839 they sailed all the way north to the upper end of Long Island were captured by the US government and thrown into prison to be tried as pirates and murderers and then abolitionists flocked to the prison to work with them so the way I treated this was as a a process in which mostly white abolitionists and African insurrectionists are in the same jail mutually influencing each other but the primary resistance was the act of the uprising itself this meant trying to displace an older historiography that made the white saviours the story the progressive abolitionists and judges and things like that my whole argument was exactly the contrary the key to the successful Amistad Rebellion was African military knowledge in Sierra Leone that's how they were able to capture the ship that's how they were able to emancipate themselves so basically in my view as a historian you have to take the many different kinds of resistance and combine them that's why I always emphasize that Benjamin Lay is the product of a decade of uprisings by enslaved people in a way that produced him so I don't want to anyway reduce his story to a feel-good story for white people on the contrary you've got to look at the body of resistance and think about how change actually happens from below okay so we're here from Ali and then Vanya and then was that a hand you in the green shirt nope okay so Benjamin thank you for Ali and I guess it really started talking about that my question is about it's actually about ethnography I guess I'm a geographer a better ethnographer and I guess this book is quite different from others of yours I guess because you do like foreground a character again in the context of of course you know the sort of context of the time etc my question is like how exceptional was he in a sense like as a ethnographer I will study a place and then I will always think every place or every person is unique but nobody is special so I guess what are the benefits of foregrounding a story and I guess I mean I wonder if you see that as an instantiation as opposed to of a process or of different characters or any story slaves in the first instance and also I guess on a related note I was thinking about today and as today you have in the mainstream you have journalistic accounts and ethnographies coming up so I wonder what kind of archive we're building now if we're thinking of history from below as something that needs to be encouraged to understand history like previous to like the last few decades now we're actually having the mainstream a lot of everyday life stories coming up with journalistic accounts and ethnographies so of course you have diaries etc but what kind of history from below will be necessary you're thinking the future you're talking about today and the last question is if you know that what book did he actually hold up with the bladder, with the blueberries etc what was the book that Benjamin Lay held up if you know that okay fine so thank you for a wonderful talk and a refreshing experience to see Atlantic history being recounted in this unique fashion of yours and it's a privilege to be here with someone who has published such important books as you did I want to ask you something that is partly theoretical and partly simply a practical question as a fellow co-historian I suppose and I suspect that the hierarchy of sources that you encounter in the colonial archive is nothing to reckon with on a daily basis I want you to ask you about the epistemic and other types of violence that the colonial archive produces and the ways to avoid it and I want to suggest that one of the critical but provocative interventions was by Sadie Hartman and others who suggested that perhaps what we need is a critical formulation I want you to reflect on this possibility thank you okay is there another question thank you so much for talking this is more of a student question I think that comes up a lot in talks but I am interested for those of us who are not necessarily going to be historians or are not interested in academia how you think we can tell stories about people and integrate into whatever work we do the multiple subjectivities that go into them as we were discussing with this individual and sort of going forward how can we prevent the histories from above from dominating the histories from the level okay right good questions okay so this question of uniqueness I was trained in social history to be very suspicious of uniqueness and to ask about the representativeness of every single thing under study but I guess I have kind of changed my view over time because I suspect Benjamin Lay was fairly unique although I do know another man another Quaker who had some very similar experiences and it was one of the others who broke through at just about exactly the same time he was a radical Quaker with a close experience of slavery and he had been a sailor I don't know about the commenting part a man named Ralph Sandofford so part of my answer will be to say well let's do more history from below and find out how unique these people really are right but I think we won't find very many people like Benjamin Lay but that doesn't mean that he's not by virtue of his uniqueness a powerful historical agent and here's actually a political point some of you are interested in the present Benjamin Lay teaches us a very significant lesson about politics and that is the importance of agitation he was an agitator now by that I mean and I think the left has kind of forgotten this lesson but in every meeting that Benjamin Lay was in he drew a line on the question of slavery and he said which side are you on are you on the side for it or are you against it there's no middle ground and a lot of people hated him for doing that but we now know that the 20 years when he was the leading spokesperson for the Quaker movement more Quaker hearts and minds were changed and people moved to anti-slavery positions during that time than any other time so by sheer relentlessness of agitating this unique character forced people to make choices and increasingly they chose not to be involved with slavery so actually at a certain point in the 1750s when Benjamin was already quite old suddenly some younger leaders come to the Quaker movement and boom things really started moving suddenly because things had happened so I guess I want to in a way honor his uniqueness let me take the two points about the archive together because I think they're really critical and you know I've been working in archives for a long time and I think probably the most profound experience of doing historical research was when I was working on the slave ship about which there is a stunning variety and volume of evidence you know business records I mean the slave trade was a massive business right? that's one of the things that makes the slave trade database so comprehensive they have evidence on 36,000 different voyages but my critique of that approach of using those business records was to say all of that contains within it a violence of its own which is in this case the violence of abstraction that enslaved people were essentially reduced to abstract commodities and and were never seen as living, suffering breathing, struggling resisting people and my view was that it's the difference between abstract knowledge and concrete knowledge and both can be extremely useful but if we're going to struggle with the continuing power of the legacy of slavery because folks those ships are all still sailing they are still sailing around the edges of our consciousness because we live with the consequences of those ships every day of our lives right? and we can't struggle unless we have a different kind of knowledge of what the slave trade actually was so that's why I gave my book the subtitle a human history so we move into an archive that is created by the forces of capitalism in this case right? but we then make choices about how we want to reconstruct the reality that those sources depict and depict in a wide variety of ways I use that database in all kinds of ways but I never thought it was sufficient as a way of approaching the human story of what happened to people on board those slave ships that we need in order to wrestle with these issues in the present we have to have a different kind of knowledge so I think that's an example of the way in which there are inherent types of violence disguised frequently as statistics in the archive and I will also say this I made the argument in that book that the political economists who reduce everything to factors of production and who talk about the slave trade in statistical ways are only continuing the methods that merchants in that period used in order to hide from themselves the consequences of what they were doing so this I think is this is really crucial and the final question very good question how to prevent the histories from above from dominating histories from below that question is almost always going to depend on the power and the afterlife of movements from below so it's up to us we have the social history that we have now you could argue at least in American history and I think in other histories too the single greatest advance in all scholarship over the past 50 years is in the study of slavery what we know about slavery now is extraordinary compared to what we knew before the civil rights movement and before the black power movement those movements are necessary conditions to creating new kinds of knowledge based on new political demands so those movements have had an afterlife they had a powerful afterlife new kinds of history new kinds of teaching I saw it in the way my children were schooled they were schooled in ways completely different not completely different but substantially different from the way I was schooled in terms of what I knew about race and slavery something completely different and that was the result of those struggles but it is always a struggle and it's never over so we have now in the United States the state of Texas is making it illegal to teach about the civil rights movement this is the way it goes there is a tremendous battle I was part of a textbook produced originally for trade union education called Who Built America it's a play on Brex Poem American History written from the point of view of the people who actually built the country imagine that so anyway one of our organizers one of our colleagues who worked on this was one of the early people in understanding the power of creating CD-ROMs to go along with books so he created a CD-ROM of these two volumes of this book and that CD-ROM was picked up by Apple and bundled into software for schools from kindergarten through grade 12 and then there developed a big protest over the inclusion of that CD and this subversive American history but here's a word to the wise it wasn't the history of slavery that they objected to these are mostly Christian evangelicals it was the story of gay cowboys that was the one they just couldn't stand the idea of their children reading about gay cowboys so these struggles have a lot of curious twists and turns but my point is it's always a battle it is always a battle it will always be a battle there are very reactionary forces that want us to go back to the great white man it's a battle other questions for another round let's see if there's anyone else who... thank you very much Ndido I really enjoyed your talk I'm interested in the theatre that you described that Benjamin Lay was taking part in did he write about his own theatre himself like these political activism gests that he was doing did he write his own account of those writing about those and then I'm thinking presumably he is having an influence and the world is changing at the same time because other people are also being influenced by things like the uprisings in Haiti the maritime consciousness and these other things so he's taking part in a kind of border political movement I'm trying to compare that now if we were told don't use any internal engines because this is don't use internal combustion engines don't use oil as a resource because this is a violence that is destroying our terms of development in the same way as slavery was destroying its own terms of development back then I wonder if there's a parallel that can be drawn and the kind of reaction that that would get I'm thinking we had a new text the other day on cars polluting in London and everyone's up in arms for £10 a day and that sort of thing can be drawn from struggles now and over here thanks very much for that presentation I also work on sailors but about three centuries later and looking at their radicalism and actually my question is about the comparison between the period that you're talking about which is the European bourgeois revolutions and the sort of radicalism they're producing among the maritime workforce the argument that some maritime historians for the age of steam make is that you had these centuries of the saleship which was this period of swashbuckling like mutinies and then you come to the age of steam and then everything is sort of very regulated and legal and that seems to me and this is the question that I sort of grapple with is it seems counterintuitive because exactly as you're saying you know you have movements and revolutionary movements, anti-colonial movements also in the 20th century and you have this perhaps even more international maritime workforce in the 20th century and yet so what I'm wondering is is it a blind spot then that maritime historians for a later period have as you were saying the sort of methodological nationalism was able to look at those interactions between sailors later on and you know what it did to their subjective world views and I really love the thing you mentioned about Walter Benjamin and sailors and storytellers or is there something that sort of changes qualitatively from the age of sale to steam in terms of the cosmopolitanism that you talked about big question you said Benjamin Ray was the last person of the last sorry can you start over you said Benjamin Ray was the last person of the radical tradition of the British but I thought that the Chartista was the last generation of radicals in the England so was there any linkage between Benjamin Ray and the British radical movement at this time or why why did you say all the radical movement in terms of the 70s finished or the Chartista thank you is there any one last question before I take you okay yeah Pedro thank you just a link to some of your other works is there any evidence of whether he was involved with piracy did that influence his views because there seems to be a lot about their own struggles the radical democracy they were going for and so on and finally just in connection to the question I was asked earlier about the colonial archives I am finding that I am getting ready to do my dissertation and I find these colonial archives actually kind of triggering and really problematic in a whole lot of ways in like thinking of like African folks just in general like oral tradition has always been the ways of how we have passed things on so I am thinking of like this fight that I am going to have to put up maybe possibly with like the resistance of like how colonial archives are problematic and wanting to like possibly because I am going to be talking about maroon societies in the context of like different human rights issues but how to resist maybe not the sources of this information when we are going back and we are looking and we are having to do it like and also wanting to insert the oral tradition especially of black folks because that is typically how we passed up on I think every one of these questions deserves a full hour response Benjamin Lay really did not talk about his own theatrical work but I know he was very conscious of it because he was I think copying what diogenes and the cynic philosophers did I think one reason why he didn't comment on it is that Quakers and other Protestants of this time period did not like the theatre because it seemed too aristocratic too libertine too much part of a different sort of tradition it was false it was full of vanity so they didn't like it but what's interesting to me is that Lay performs theatre despite that in other words he doesn't let that view get in his way but and you might be interested to know that Lay working with a friend of mine who was a quite distinguished playwright Naomi Wallace and were writing a play about Benjamin Lay to try to bring his history and also frankly his spirit to people in another way because he was a person of very great spirit with regard to your the second part of your question one of the things that really fascinated me about Benjamin Lay was that he understood quite well that the manufacture of sugar was an extremely important technology of that day and so I've compared him in the book to William Blake with whom actually he has a great deal in common they are both antinomian radicals both with links to the English Revolution both very interested in the book of Revelation which is kind of the source of radicalism for both of them and if Blake denounced the dark satanic mills of industrial England Lay denounced the hellish iron furnaces of the Caribbean I think it's like a fascinating parallel and therein you have the Eric Williams thesis about the connection from the one to the other the way in which slavery helped to finance industrialization so and as far as connections to the present you know I've had a lot of conversations with myself about what Benjamin Lay would say if he were to walk through the door right now and I don't think he'd be too happy at all about all kinds of things but that's all speculation and I can't be sure although maybe in the play we could address some of that so so this is a very big question about the age of sale and the age of steam and of course you know because you're working on it but here's what I would say about that I think there is a very long-term trans-historical theme about motley crews at sea multi-ethnic groups of people make up sailing ships from roughly 1500 to the present that is a very long continuity and if you look at the crew list for Columbus and Magellan they have English, Italian, Dutch Greek and African on board it's already an international labour market and this is really critical but I do think the thing that happens there is one big change and my colleague Tilda Cazola is organizing a conference on this theme to be held at the University of Virginia in March the way in which race comes to define the division of labour changes dramatically and that changes in the technical division of labour in capitalism worldwide and it changes in terms of what happens on board each ship that certain jobs become in the 19th century jobs for different races of people especially the heaving coal so I think we have to as we look at this subject we need to stand back and look at structural changes in the capitalist system in terms of how labour is recruited allocated all the rest and the way specifically that race to play an ever greater role in that over time the way in a sense that gets institutionalized over time so I think that's a that's a that would be a dividing line exactly where to draw it between sail and steam is hard to say I don't think it's a simple matter of the technology there are other things going on in the way labour markets are created the way primitive accumulation is happening in different places in different times these are all very important so I think maybe you'll answer that question better than I I did not mean to say that Benjamin Lay was the last radical of a broader tradition of English revolutionary thought only that he was in some sense maybe the last radical infused with very specific ideas from the English Revolution which he sought self-consciously to perpetuate or to reinvent we might say now I do think that some of those same ideas do show up in the chart of movement these things have a remarkable resiliency these underground ideas so I think one of the really interesting things that for example well put it this way one of the points of writing this book, The Many-Headed Hydra was to take where Christopher Hill left off the story in 1660 and where Edward Thompson picked up the story in 1790 and look at what happens to radicalism in between and what happens it gets there's this oceanic generalisation of radicalism so that by the time you get to the 1790s you have people like Alauda Equiano the African sailor who is playing a key role in the British abolitionist movement he's a really very important part of all that so what I want to do I guess one of the things I wanted to do in my work is to understand the continuities of these radical traditions but also understand their ruptures and how they change at specific times based on the experience that people go through in different generations I think that's really crucial I don't know if Benjamin Lay was known by the Chartists but I would love to find out I do know that he was known by a lot of abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s but I think that's still something that requires more study I don't have any evidence that Benjamin Lay was sympathetic to pirates he actually has one comment about them in the book and it's kind of negative but I will tell you this much in terms of the radicalism that was expressed within this maritime tradition and the way in which that took a certain form among pirates with a more democratic social order and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth as I think back on Benjamin Lay's days as a sailor knowing what I know about him I can't imagine there was a more radical sailor than he on any ship he was a member of I just can't imagine it because it's just his core principles were very certain he was committed to equality and he would fight at the drop of a hat I thought I might be able to find some evidence of him getting in trouble in the Admiralty courts I couldn't find it doesn't mean it didn't happen because these records are quite incomplete but I do think that Benjamin Lay was certainly I'll just tell you one last story which I think illustrates his commitment to maritime radicalism not long before he died he asked a favor of a friend which was this was just total heresy at that time he said that when he died he wanted his friends to burn his body to ashes and spread the ashes on the ocean now cremation actually becomes a more acceptable sort of thing in the 19th century but when Benjamin Lay said this this was nothing but paganism pure and simple and I think that there's some deep truth in this about the origins of his ideas that he came from the sea and he wanted to go back to the sea and finally the oral tradition I could not agree more about the dilemma and I actually tried to solve this in a fairly practical way because after I finished writing this book on the Amistad Rebellion in which I argued that the key to the whole story lies in Sierra Leone where all of the Amistad Africans had come from after the book was published I went with a small group of historians and a film crew to Sierra Leone and we I had discovered in my research which villages the Amistad Africans came from so I went to those villages and we with the help of a very skilled Sierra Leonean linguistics professor man named Tazif Karoma we arranged conversations with village elders to learn about their history and to find out if there were any surviving stories of the Amistad Rebellion in their communities now this is important because the Amistad rebels won their court case in America and the survivors 34 of them were repatriated to Sierra Leone they went home this is really rare the stories of the rebellion with them and we filmed this actually I showed this film so as a couple of years ago it's called Ghosts of Amistad I think you have it in the library if you want to see it but basically it came down to this and it's not surprising in some villages there was no memory in some villages there was a little memory but in two villages there was a lot of memory where people, actually in one village we found a direct descendant of one of the Amistad Africans who returned to his village so the archive is living you can go to places and talk to people about the historical subjects you want to learn about now this also raises a whole new complicated set of ethical questions about how you relate to people I did not assume that they necessarily wanted to share their history with us but the man who was our cultural guide Tazif Karoma was very well known and very well respected in these villages he was actually from this region he spoke the very specific dialect that we were talking with people in and he was a very important reason why people were willing to talk to us because they trusted him the biggest mistake we made was that we did not take with us the female equivalent of Tazif Karoma and we found that women elders did not feel comfortable speaking either to us or necessarily in the presence of the male elders and we felt as though an entire body of knowledge was not available to us so this is a very important point in that if you were going to do research in certain need to understand exactly how the transmission of knowledge works we met a woman the last day of our time in Sierra Leone an elderly woman who had the deepest memory of any person we talked to she could take us back very far into the history of the region she knew things about battles that took place and she said all of this knowledge was passed down on the female side of the family there is no sort of male storytelling tradition of the kind that you have in Senegal for example in Sierra Leone but we learned things about the Amistad Rebellion that we could not access through the traditional archive we met a man who took us to Lomboco the slave trading factory whose knowledge was just stunning he knew things that he could not have known in any other way except through the orderly transmission of stories over about seven generations I was blown away by what he knew so he was a very very important source he knew things that nobody else knew so this kind of research is possible you don't have to depend just on the documents you can access the oral tradition thank you for everyone for coming thanks to Paru and thanks to Marcus for a fascinating and insightful talk thanks a lot