Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
The first thing that caught my attention in Linebaugh and Rediker’s work was the decision to explore on two of the groups of slaves and wage laborers. There topic provides an interesting opportunity to reframe many of the topics we’ve discussed which have primarily omitted any mention of interracial collaboration towards political objectives (we’ve talked about slaves accepting offers to fight for their freedom, but I would argue that to be a personal objective).
The idea of interracial collaboration in riots certainly hints at the potential of larger proletariat identity existing prior to the 1800s but there were things that bothered me in their work. For instance, the use of Sam Adam’s assertion that the mob ‘embodied the fundamental rights of man against which government itself could be judged’ suggests that the legitimate use of mobs and the threat of mob violence was a new phenomenon in early American society (231). While Adam may have been the first to ideologically defend the notion, we’ve already seen that mob violence was a tool employed by communities long before the lead up to the American revolution. Moreover, the inclusion of the Irish Whiteboys as part of 1768 London riot also seemed somewhat out of place. While it does introduce the important notion of striking as a form of political protest and the bridging of ethnic divisions, the desire to place the Irish at the forefront seemed strained and moved away from the theme of interracial rioting. While the authors used four separate instances to try to prove their point, I feel that the width of the study took away from the details needed to prove their assertion. While they offer the idea of general economic oppression being the cause of many of the riots, the sources they use to talk about the events often come from the “bourgeois” side of the event as they describe the complexion of the rioters in a manner that would seek to reflect their desires. Sources from the rioters would either offer specific reasons that these individuals chose to rebel with one another and show an awareness of a larger proletariat identity or the lack thereof.
Moving on to somewhat unrelated things, I’d like to tackle something AJ mentioned in his post which was “Really, after all that led up to the rebellion, only a few frontiersmen went to jail.” This reminded me of something I thought of in class. In my opinion Slaughter provided his readers, mainly historians, with these excessive details in an effort to convince us that the Whiskey rebellion was part of this frontier conflict and the East vs. West divide that was an extremely important in American history. After reading a book as dense as Slaughter’s, I’d certainly like to believe this is the case but the fact that only a few men went to jail and nothing really happened in its aftermath makes me wonder if this conflict is as central as Slaughter attempts to make it. Just something to ponder.