Top 5 Marcus Rediker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Job Bayley, facing death for piracy in a Charleston courtroom in 1718, was asked by the attorney general of South Carolina why he and his fellow freebooters fought Colonel William Rhett and the vessels sent by the government against them. Bayley probably brought a roar of laughter from those attending the trial when he answered, “We thought it had been a pirate.”

— Marcus Rediker

2. “The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship’s pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.”

— Marcus Rediker

3. “It was on old joke among underfed, angry sailors that should mutiny fail, the weight of their bodies would not be enough to hang them.”

— Marcus Rediker

4. “John Atkins, the naval surgeon, spoke of the transition from privateer to pirate as going from “plundering for others, to do it for themselves.”

— Marcus Rediker

5. “Seamen could expect little relief from the law, whose purpose in the eighteenth-century Atlantic was, according to Jesse Lemisch, “to assure a ready supply of cheap, docile labor.”

— Marcus Rediker

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