Niklas Frykman – författare

The global legacy of mutiny and revolution on the high seas.Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

This volume explores the transnational dimensions of mutiny and maritime radicalism during the great cycle of war and revolution that began in the mid-1750s and continued until the 1840s. The central theme of the volume is mutiny - its causes, frequency, forms, patterns and outcomes - charting, linking and comparing maritime insurrections in different oceans, on warships, merchant vessels and convict ships. The contributions concentrate on the mutineers themselves, their social composition, self-organisation, objectives and ideas. Also included is unrest in port cities, sites of international exchange between maritime and landed forms of resistance. Sailors spent significant amounts of time in port, sometimes connecting shipboard unrest and radical movements on land in personal, political and social ways. The contributions cover the age of revolution in its full geographic extent, including the Atlantic with its wars and revolutions, but also the Indian and Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea.