Synopses & Reviews
Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.
Synopsis
Law, Labour, and Empire provides a comparative analysis of the development and impact of maritime labour and law in the early modern period.
About the Author
Maria Fusaro is Associate Professor (Reader) in Early Modern European History at the University of Exeter, UK, where she directs the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies. She is the author of Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England 1450-1700 (2015).
Bernard Allaire is a Canadian historian living in France, associated with the CMMC (University Of Nice). He is the author of Pelleteries, manchons et chapeaux de castor, (1999) Crépuscules ultramontains: marchands italiens et grand commerce à Bordeaux au XVIe siècle (2008) and La Rumeur Dorée (2013).
Richard Blakemore specialises in early modern British social and maritime history. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, UK, having studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, and worked at the University of Exeter. He has published on navigational culture and the role of seafarers in the British civil wars of the 1640s.
Tijl Vanneste works mainly on global history in the early modern period. He is interested in international commerce, migration, diaspora and Brazil. He currently works as researcher at the University of Exeter, UK and is also attached to Université Paris-VII Diderot, France and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has published a monograph on early modern diamond trade.
Table of Contents
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, and Tijl Vanneste
1. Overview: Trades, Ports and Ships: The Roots of Difference in Sailors' Lives; Richard W. Unger
PART I: SAILORS AND LAW
2. The Invasion of Northern Litigants: English and Dutch Seamen in Mediterranean Courts of Law; Maria Fusaro
3. Until the Very Last Nail: English Seafaring and Wage Litigation in Seventeenth-Century Livorno; Andrea Addobbati
4. Sailors' Legal Rights in a Mediterranean Hub: the Case of Malta; Joan Abela
5. Between Oléron and Colbert: The Evolution of French Maritime Law until the Seventeenth Century; Bernard Allaire
6. The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575-1729; Richard J. Blakemore
PART II: SAILORS AND LABOUR
7. Sailing through the Strait: Seamen's Professional Trajectories from a Segmented Labour Market in Holland to a Fragmented Mediterranean; Tijl Vanneste
8. The Hanseatics in Southern Europe: Structure and Payment of German Long-Distance Shipping, 1630-1700; Magnus Ressel
9. Mobility, Migration and Human Capital in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Life of Joseph Anton Ponsaing; Jelle van Lottum, Catherine Sumnall, and Aske Brock
10. Dividing the Spoils: Research into the Paybook and Other Documents relating to the Privateering Voyage of the Duke and Dutchess, 1711; Tim Beattie
11. Coral Fishermen in Barbary in the Eighteenth Century: Between Norms and Practices; Olivier Lopez
PART III: SAILORS AND EMPIRE
12. Portuguese Seafarers: Informal Agents of Empire Building; Amélia Polónia
13. Spanish Mariners in a Global Context; Carla Rahn Phillips
14. Deserters, Mutineers and Criminals: British Sailors and Problems of Port Jurisdiction in Genoa and Livorno during the Eighteenth Century; Danilo Pedemonte
15. Claiming their Rights? Indian Sailors under the Dutch East India Company; Matthias van Rossum
16. Chinese Seamen in London and St Helena in the Early Nineteenth Century; Yóu bó qing
Afterword; Maria Fusaro
General Bibliography