Ideology did not produce consent. The English ruling class encountered resistance at every turn. Enclosure, appropriation and forced labour of various kinds, including, of course, enslavement, were all challenged. In Europe, Africa and the New World, as well as at sea, there was constant mutiny, revolt, heresy and escape. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker explain in The Many Headed Hydra, for more than two hundred years, beginning with the start of the English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century, the new ruling class imagined itself – in terms of ancient Greek mythology – as Hercules subduing the monstrous many-headed hydra – “a symbol of disorder and resistance”. Women denounced as witches, vagabonds, heretics, pirates, commoners and colonised people defending their land and autonomy, Maroons and rebellious slaves all appeared as a monstrous hydra that “justified the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executioners, of plantations, ships, and factories”.
As the plantation system was developed in the New World, forced labour was imported, initially from Europe, and then from Africa. In the 1620s, the majority of the forced labour in Virginia was English. By some accounts what Robinson called ‘the terrible culture of race’ was not yet sutured to the body. Theodore W. Allen argues: “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.” He writes that he could find “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law: “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’”
In 1649, there were still radical struggles in England, largely commoners resisting enclosure in the name of heresy. Their opposition to domination and dispossession at home sometimes extended to a universal commitment to equality and freedom. In 1649, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading thinker in The Diggers, a movement that occupied land, wrote that: ‘‘As divers members of our human bodies make but one body perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind”. Later that year he asserted that the Earth was a common treasury ‘‘for whole mankind in all his branches, without respect of persons.’’
