Many-Headed Hydra

Long before the American Revolution, the powerless and dispossessed - commoners, religious radicals, felons, pirates, labourers, soldiers, sailors and African slaves - were voicing ideas about freedom and equality that would change the course of history. This book charts a series of insurrections that, from Bristol to Barbados, and from the English Civil War to the New York Conspiracy of 1741, struck fear of 'the Hydra of misrule' into colonial empires on both sides of the Atlantic.