Mutiny In The Danish Atlantic World

*** Danish Historical Society Award Winner (2018) “Historical research result of the year” *** Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World discusses how the storytelling of the lower classes shaped antagonisms and struggles for agency in the early modern Atlantic. It takes a mutiny carried out by a group of convicts and sailors on board a Danish ship, the Merman, in 1683 as its central case study. En route to Denmark's Caribbean colony of St. Thomas, the mutineers seized the ship, murdered the captain and six others and elected a former convict as their new leader. This event brought the West India Company to the brink of destruction and changed the course of the fledgling Danish maritime empire forever. Arguing that the mutiny on the Merman was informed by stories and rumour that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic and echoed on the lower deck of the ship itself, Johan Heinsen explores the role of such stories in the social worlds of early modern colonialism. He argues that sites such as ships, colonies and even prisons resonated with words, paying particular attention to how such storytelling created bonds and enabled action. In making the point that historians should pay careful attention to the power of the words of colonial and maritime lower class subjects, Heinsen draws on comparable cases across the early modern seas. Heinsen's study brings the Danish Empire to a new Anglophone audience, expanding our knowledge of the Atlantic world. It brings a fascinating new perspective to topics such as the history of penal transportation, coerced labour and historiographies of storytelling and rumour, making it an important book for students and scholars of Atlantic, maritime, imperial and global labour history.

"Examines how storytelling and rumour among the lower classes shaped antagonisms and struggles for agency in the early modern Atlantic world, using a case study from the Danish Empire."--Provided by publisher.

*** Danish Historical Society Award Winner (2018) “Historical research result of the year” *** Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World discusses how the storytelling of the lower classes shaped antagonisms and struggles for agency in the early modern Atlantic. It takes a mutiny carried out by a group of convicts and sailors on board a Danish ship, the Merman, in 1683 as its central case study. En route to Denmark's Caribbean colony of St. Thomas, the mutineers seized the ship, murdered the captain and six others and elected a former convict as their new leader. This event brought the West India Company to the brink of destruction and changed the course of the fledgling Danish maritime empire forever. Arguing that the mutiny on the Merman was informed by stories and rumour that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic and echoed on the lower deck of the ship itself, Johan Heinsen explores the role of such stories in the social worlds of early modern colonialism. He argues that sites such as ships, colonies and even prisons resonated with words, paying particular attention to how such storytelling created bonds and enabled action. In making the point that historians should pay careful attention to the power of the words of colonial and maritime lower class subjects, Heinsen draws on comparable cases across the early modern seas. Heinsen's study brings the Danish Empire to a new Anglophone audience, expanding our knowledge of the Atlantic world. It brings a fascinating new perspective to topics such as the history of penal transportation, coerced labour and historiographies of storytelling and rumour, making it an important book for students and scholars of Atlantic, maritime, imperial and global labour history.

A new global history perspective on the relationship between convict mobility and governance, nation building, imperial expansion, and knowledge formation.

The global legacy of mutiny and revolution on the high seas. Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

Offering an introduction to the world's seas as a platform for global exchange and connection, Michael North offers an impressive world history of the seas over more than 3,000 years. Exploring the challenges and dangers of the oceans that humans have struggled with for centuries, he also shows the possibilities and opportunities they have provided from antiquity to the modern day. Written to demonstrate the global connectivity of the seas, but also to highlight regional maritime power during different eras, A World History of the Seas takes sailors, merchants and migrants as the protagonists of these histories and explores how their experiences and perceptions of the seas were consolidated through trade and cultural exchange. Bringing together the various maritime historiographies of the world and underlining their unity, this book shows how the ocean has been a vital and natural space of globalization. Carrying goods, creating alliances, linking continents and conveying culture, the history of the ocean played a central role in creating our modern globalized world.

Taking the kingdom of Denmark as its frame of reference, this volume presents a range of close analyses that shed light on the construction and deconstruction of crime and criminals, on criminal cultures and on crime control from 1500 to 2000. Historically, there have been major changes in the legal definition of those acts that are legally defined as being criminal offences – and of those that are not. This volume explores the criteria and perceptions underlying definitions of crime in a powerful and absolutist Lutheran state and subsequently in a Denmark characterised by social welfare and sexual liberation. It places special focus on moral issues rooted in considerations of religion and sexuality.