Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History, 22-23 September 2023
Organizing committee: Pepijn Brandon, Niklas Frykman, Marcus Rediker, and Nandita Sharma
Ships and oceans, shorelines and harbors historically have been the theater of dramatic social struggles. The term “hydrarchy”, introduced a quarter century ago in The Many-Headed Hydra, tried to capture the double-edged nature of these struggles. The crucial place of the oceans in the development of a capitalist world market led states and ruling classes to launch determined struggles to own or control the waters, as well as the peoples who worked on and around them. At the same time, working classes of all hues and the seaborne populations they were part of devised new ways to exchange experiences, ideas, and forms of struggles, developing wide-ranging practices of solidarity in the process.
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