Promotional Information

Examines how storytelling and rumour among the lower classes shaped antagonisms and struggles for agency in the early modern Atlantic world, using a case study from the Danish Empire.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Meanings of Mutiny 1. Promises and Echoes 2. In the Absence of a Speaker 3. Voices from the Lower Decks 4. Stories in Chains 5. Fragile Communities 6. Dissonant Empire Conclusion: Resonant Atlantics Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Johan Heinsen is Assistant Professor of History at Aarlborg University, Denmark. He has published articles in journals including Atlantic Studies and Radical History Review.

Reviews

[A] tour de force of social history from below. Theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written, the book will stimulate debate in graduate seminars and among scholars engaged in writing a global history from below. It deserves a broad, attentive audience.
*H-War*

This is a wonderful and energetic reading of early Danish colonial projects in the Atlantic … [Heinsen] has presented a thought-provoking book that is relevant not merely to scholars of Danish maritime and Atlantic history, but also to historians interested in the role played by subaltern thoughts and actions in the building of empires, small and large.
*Journal of Social History*

The bulk of the text consists of the author’s analysis of the mutiny, in which he speculates about the role that the storytelling, rumors, and myths of the major actors … may have played in shaping the mindset of the exploited denizens of the lower decks and the company men above them, who effectively changed the Danish empire forever.
*CHOICE*

The author is ... able to provide a rich and detailed narrative of the events unfolding on the ship, and the individuals involved, which is a great value of this book.
*European History Quarterly*

Deeply researched and beautifully written, Johan Heinsen’s new book is not only one of the most sophisticated studies of mutiny in the early modern Atlantic world. It is also a highly creative, theoretically driven meditation on the dissonant noises of the archive, and a powerful recovery of the faint, distant muttering of those violently muted makers of history, the Atlantic proletariat. This is bottom-up history at its very best.
*Niklas Frykman, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh, USA*

This innovative history of the Danish Atlantic is global history from the bottom up of the very best kind. Bringing the history of convicts, slaves and indentured servants to bear on histories of mutiny, resistance and subaltern agency, it will become a vital reference point in the history of European empires in the seventeenth century, and the history of the Atlantic world.
*Clare Anderson, Professor of History, University of Leicester, UK*