Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction

Abstract

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutionary era until now.

The Human Relationship with Our Ocean Planet

“…Sea-voyaging, exploration and coastal trade and population interchange have provided key pathways for such exchanges. Before the rapid growth of air travel and the internet in the late twentieth century, ships were the most important tool of globalisation (Frykman et al 2013). Port cities, receiving and sending ships to different destinations, were and are sites of cosmopolitanism and multi-or polyculturalism, of coastal and maritime trading societies that have been and could once again be a foundation for efforts at improved labour force diversity and inclusion, regional and global cooperation, the building of a shared ocean vision and a reinvigorated multilateralism.…”

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

“…It also casts light on some of Gandhi's arguments about the RIN and the 1946 mutiny by destabilizing her nationstate focused, terra-centric account. This is important because it contributes to a growing body of literature examining the intersections between maritime spaces as places of both mutiny and radicalism (Frykman et al 2013;Jaffer 2015). It is also useful to see the mutiny in the light of Itty Abraham's (2015) article on the Singapore mutiny of 1915.…”

Special issue introduction: maritime networks and transnational spaces

“…This suggests the importance of thinking about the antagonisms shaped through different ways of articulating maritime spaces and the different forms of agency generated through such struggles. The articles here have sought to offer productive ways of accounting for engaging such oppositional political agency (see also Frykman et al 2013). The terms on which the agency of maritime workers might be asserted or recovered has been usefully probed by Ravi Ahuja who cautions against accounts which 'abstract the experiences of (individual or collective) historical actors from larger, very concrete, but … often opaque historical processes' (Ahuja 2012: 83).…”