My review of the book is linked @ http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/the-fearless-benjamin-lay-quaker-dwarf.html
Q How did you come to write about Lay. Was it something you had always aspired to?
I first learned about Benjamin Lay in the 1990s as Peter Linebaugh, and I worked on a book entitled The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000). We were interested in cycles of rebellion that erupted around the Atlantic in the 1730s, the 1760s, the 1790s, and wondered if slave revolts helped to generate new abolitionist ideas. Lay’s radical anti-slavery book, All Slave-keepers that keep the Innocent in Bondage … Apostates (1738), reflected his consciousness of the rising tide of resistance. After I learned about Lay and his acts of guerrilla theatre, I thought to myself, this man deserves a book of his own. Some twenty years later, he got it.
Q. The connection between Lay and the English Revolution and its radical wing is fascination, could you elaborate more?
The religious radicals so lovingly chronicled by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (1972), provide the essential context for understanding the life and ideas of Benjamin Lay. Among the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Muggletonians, and yes, the early Quakers were many antinomian radicals, people who felt that the gift of God’s grace had placed them above man-made law, which was created by wicked rich people for their own purposes anyway. Lay carried a revolutionary body of ideas – about democracy, equality, and human rights – into the eighteenth century and included within it the principles of anti-slavery. I, therefore, call Lay “the last radical of the English Revolution.” He connected that revolutionary era to the late eighteenth-century “age of revolution,” which encompassed major uprisings in America, France, and what became Haiti. He embodied the long underground life of radical ideas.
Q In my review I cite Lay as a figure of the Enlightenment. Do you agree?
I agree, Lay is definitely a man of the Enlightenment, but not the usual one we think of when we use that term – the movement that emerged in the late eighteenth century among white, male, elite thinkers in France and across Europe. Lay was enlightened much earlier and in a different way, not in the salons of Paris or London – rather on deep-sea sailing ships and on the docks of Barbados, where he heard about and witnessed the horrors of slavery and turned decisively against them. Lay, in my view, is a representative of “enlightenment from below.” He was one of many working people who took a different route to a vision of a more humanitarian future.
Q The genre history from below is one you use a lot. Could you describe the pros and cons of such a genre? Do you feel it has a future?
This is a well-established way to view history, especially in the UK. A key text, as you know, is Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Its strengths have included a broader, more inclusive, more democratic vision of the past and an ability to understand both the experiences and the contributions of ordinary working people in the unfolding of history. Its weaknesses have been an occasional tendency not to concentrate on class as a relationship, which always requires looking at history “from above,” especially if one wants to understand the operation of power.
I am much encouraged about the future of history from below. As new movements from below arise around the world around the many-sided issue of inequality, all seeking in one way or another “power to the people,” the demand for this kind of history is bound to increase. If we want a new kind of society, we are going to need a new history to guide us.
Q What is your next project?
I am writing a play entitled “The Return of Benjamin Lay” with my friend, the distinguished playwright Naomi Wallace. History from below meets theatre from below! My next history book project will be a study of work at sea in the age of sail. This will be a voyage through the oceans of world history with Herman Melville as my shipmate. I will use his sea-novels to explore the issues of labour, class, and power at sea.
