Sea-born

In a National Geographic interview, Marcus Rediker explains how ships provided the setting for developing some of the distinctive institutions and ideas of the modern world:

“Large northern European seagoing vessels, which emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries, become by the 18th century the most important technology in the world. They can be seen as a precursor of the factory, in the sense that they required large numbers of wage workers to come together and operate machinery to make the vessel go.

“That’s a work process that creates value, tremendous value, for the world economy. But when workers are organized to sail these ships for merchants, or kings and queens, their organized cooperation also led them to imagine new projects of their own.

“They start to think about their own lives and cooperate for ends other than the ones they were brought together to serve. One of the best examples of this is in the origins of the term ‘to strike.’ Most people don’t know that the strike originates at sea, in the port of London, in 1768, amidst a wage cut. So sailors went from ship to ship and took down the sails—which is called ‘to strike the sails.’”

It’s time, he says, to get over “terracentric” accounts of history.