Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 is a 1987 work of academic history by Marcus Rediker, the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. Deploying a Marxist analytic framework, Rediker redefines the sailors of the eighteenth century as “workers afloat,” arguing that the merchant ships of the period more closely resembled the industrial factories of the nineteenth century than the artisanal workshops more common in their own era. Rediker examines the ways sailors resisted maritime hierarchies and work discipline by creating their own culture, languages, and even religious practices. Finally, he turns to mutiny and piracy, seeing these as characteristic methods of achieving freedom from economic and political restraints. Through this lens, Rediker re-examines major historical topics, including the rise of modern capitalism, the beginning of free wage labor, and the development of international working-class consciousness.

Rediker introduces the book with a statement of his project. Above all, he is interested in eighteenth-century sailors’ experience of oppression: “In reconstructing the social and cultural life of the early eighteenth-century common seaman, I have sought both to tell a story and to write a history. I hope that general readers as well as specialists will find the effort of interest. Following Tobias Smollett, one of the earliest writers concerned with the plight of the seaman, I have also sought to inspire ‘that generous indignation which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.’ As we shall see in abundant, sometimes gruesome detail, the jolly tar did indeed live in a world fully possessed of a 'sordid and vicious' side. His creative survival in it is the subject of this book.”

The remainder of the book considers the sailor and his experience from a different angle in each chapter. The first chapter examines the sailor as a “man of the world,” taking in the maritime economic geography of the North Atlantic Ocean around the year 1740. The second chapter considers the unique labor conditions onboard merchant ships, treating the sailor as a “collective worker.” The third looks at the development of free wage labor, in which a worker’s life is fully subordinate to his labor function, and the sailor’s “search for ready money.” Chapter 4 focuses on shipboard culture. Chapter 5 considers sailors’ contemporary reputation as the “spirit of rebellion” and examines the reality of labor discipline at sea. Chapter 6 turns to the topics of mutiny and piracy.



At the center of Rediker’s account are the harsh realities of life on the sea, which leave “little room for belief in the dignity of labor.” Rediker elucidates the many ways in which sailors could be killed or left incapable of working, not least amongst them, the often-fatal discipline meted out by ships’ captains. The centralization of authority in the person of the captain—who at sea was accountable to no-one but himself—made the ships of the eighteenth century “one of the first totalitarian work environments.” Rediker relates anecdotes of captains beating sailors to death with blunt instruments, and quotes a source that describes the Thames littered with the “crow-shredded corpses of seamen.” He argues that alongside this direct violence was a truly terrifying array of indirect forms of violence, including the press gang (which forcibly abducted men and forced them to work onboard ships) and frequent corporal and capital punishment handed out by admiralty courts for minor infractions by sailors.

In this context of extreme violence, Rediker has no hesitation to describe sailors’ resistance as “class war.” He argues that the British sailors of the eighteenth century constitute one of the first examples of modern “collectivized labor,” noting that the term “strike,” for a work stoppage, derives from sailors’ “striking” the sails of their ship.

Examining sailors’ resistance, Rediker draws on anthropology, linguistics, and economics to trace the development of a unique working-class culture. He argues that this culture substantially foreshadowed the fully articulated working-class culture of the industrial era to come, including its core collective, oppositional, and anti-authoritarian traits. Rediker traces the influence of sailors’ culture on land-based workers at key hubs such as the harbor and the harbor-side inn.



A key example is the “Round Robin,” a form of communication that allowed sailors to discuss the possibility of resistance without the originator of the discussion ever becoming identifiable: “The Round Robin was a cultural innovation from below, an effort at collective self-defense in the face of nearly unlimited and arbitrary authority. The Round Robin eloquently expressed the collectivistic ethos of the seaman's oppositional culture, demonstrating how the equal distribution of risks was often essential to survival.”

Rediker understands piracy as the ultimate form of this shipboard working-class culture. Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “social banditry,” Rediker argues that pirate culture was collectivist and egalitarian, defined—negatively—by the authoritarianism of the culture pirates had escaped from. While acknowledging that pirate discipline could also be violent and that pirates do not seem to have played much of a role in political developments on land, Rediker nevertheless argues that the threat pirates posed to the culture mandated by the establishment justified their status as working-class folk heroes.

In his conclusion, “The seaman as worker of the world,” Rediker declares, “The hands, dispossessed and limp, that were assembled on board the ship slowly began to curl their fingers into a collective fist.”



Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea established Rediker’s reputation as a major scholar of maritime and working-class history. He is best known for his 2007 study The Slave Ship: A Human History.