This essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the uprising possible. The essay concludes by discussing the process of mutiny, suggesting a six-phase model for understanding the dynamics of shipboard revolt, and showing how such events can have powerful historical consequences.

In 1802, several “country ships” arrived in London from Bengal, their lascar crews having suffered severe casualties due to fatigue, exposure, and starvation. Aboard the Union, the officers’ treatment of the crew was so bad that the lascars and a sympathetic English sailor alerted the East India Company. Their testimony, recorded by the Company's Committee of Shipping, provides new insights into lascar living and working conditions – in particular the problem of undermanning ships – reminding us how the management–labour dynamic aboard a ship at sea always favoured owners and officers rather than workers.

Am Ende des Ancien Régime lebte die Mehrzahl der deutschen Familien an der Grenze des Existenzminimums. Verstärkt durch den wechselhaften Witterungsverlauf schwankte die Lebenshaltung dieser Zugehörigen zu den ländlichen und nichtbürgerlichen Unterschichten wegen des ungleichmäßigen Angebots an Lebensmitteln zwischen Unterversorgung mit den lebensnotwendigen Bedürfnissen bei Minderernten (und relativ hohem Preisniveau) und damit abwechselnden Zeiten ausreichender Bedarfsdeckung in wohlfeilen Jahren. In den beiden ersten Jahrzehnten und in der Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts stieg der Anteil dieser urn die physische Existenz ihrer Familie ringenden Bevölkerungsgruppen erheblich an. Engels und Marx haben dieses Phänomen der Massenarmut (oder das Elend des Proletariats) auf die Industrialisierung und den übermächtigen Einfluß des Kapitals, das zunehmend in alle Lebensbereiche eindrang, zurückgeführt. Durch Abzug von Kapital aus dem Produktionsprozeß und Akkumulierung zu großen Vermögen würden den in der großbetrieblichen Produktion beschäftigten Arbeitern nur noch Löhne ausgezahlt, die lediglich für die Bestreitung der physischen Existenz ausreichen wiirden. Mit zunehmender Industrialisierung und Konzentration der Produktion in Fabriken hätte schließlich eine ständig wachsende Zahl von kleingewerblichen Produzenten ihren Besitz verloren und sei in die Klasse des Proletariats (Expropriation) abgesunken. Knapp hat für Deutschland noch eine Sonderentwicklung aufgezeigt, indem er als wesentliche Ursache für die Entstehung eines freien Arbeiterstandes die Bauernbefreiung herausstellte.

In the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like the Bounty or Hermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.

This article considers how enslaved salvage divers cooperated and conspired with slaveholders and white employers to salvage shipwrecks and often smuggle recovered goods into homeports, permitting them to exchange their expertise for semi-independent lives of privileged exploitation. Knowing harsh treatment could preclude diving, white salvagers cultivated reciprocal relationships with divers, promoting arduousness by avoiding coercive discipline while nurturing a sense of mutual obligation arising from collective responsibilities and material rewards. Enslaved salvagers were, in several important ways, treated like free, wage-earning men. They were well fed, receiving daily allowances of fresh meat. Most resided in seaports, were hired out, and received equal shares of recovered goods, allowing many to purchase their freedom and that of family members. Divers produced spectacular amounts of wealth for their mother countries, owners, and colonial governments, especially in the maritime colonies of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Cayman Islands. Their expertise was not confined to maritime colonies. Even as plantation slavery was taking root during the mid-seventeenth century, salvage divers provided an important source of income for planter-merchants.

This article looks at the experiences of foreigners in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, focusing on the divide between the public and the private. For Party members it was assumed that nothing could remain private or personal. In sessions of “criticism and self-criticism”, even intimate questions had to be put into the public domain, since a Party member's private life had to be exemplary. From a gender perspective, it is interesting to note that the leading justification for the public handling of private affairs in Party forums was the equality postulated between women and men, or more precisely between female and male Party members. In that sense, these discussions can be interpreted as potential tools in the hands of women to stigmatize “noncommunist” male behaviour, that is behaviour that degraded women. But the official attention given to private matters also served other means. For the Party leadership, these discussions proved instrumental in disciplining Party members, and in a particularly effective way, inasmuch as the persons concerned participated in the process. Despite the assumed gender equality, however, Soviet notions of private and public were not only constantly changing but also highly gendered. During the Terror, women and men became victims in different ways, thereby also highlighting their different social positions and functions.