| Abstract: | This paper engages with historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's account of the connections and circulations which they argue constituted a multi-ethnic Atlantic working class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Linebaugh and Rediker , ). Their stories of the mobile, networked insurgencies that traversed the early modern Atlantic challenge accounts of the geographies of resistance and labour which treat ethnicities as given and sealed, view subaltern movements as trapped in place and privilege the boundaries between spatial scales. This paper sketches some preliminary aspects of an agenda for thinking spatially the political identities constituted through Atlantic resistances. The paper foregrounds the multiple antagonisms constituted through Atlantic subaltern resistances to explore three aspects of the formation of subaltern political identities in the early-modern Atlantic. Firstly, how the spatial relations of Atlantic networks were brought into contestation through subaltern struggles. Secondly, the plural and mobile character of antagonisms between and within subaltern groups. Finally, the paper explores how subaltern agency and identities were formed in relation to the materialities of Atlantic networks. These arguments are developed through discussion of subaltern resistances in and between Ireland, Newfoundland, the West Coast of Africa, the Virgin Isles and London in the eighteenth century. |
