A global history of runaways: workers, mobility, and capitalism 1600-1850

Abstract

"During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600-1850, workers of all kinds--slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors--repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order--from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth"--Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction : flight as fight / Leo Lucassen, Lex Heerma van Voss -- Runaways and deserters in the early modern Portuguese Empire : the examples of São Tomé island, South Asia and Southern Portugal / Timothy Coates -- Escaping St. Thomas : Class relations and convict strategies in the Danish West Indies, 1672-1687 / Johan Heinsen -- Between the mountains and the sea : knowledge, networks, and transimperial desertion in the Leeward archipelago, 1627-1727 / James F. Dator -- Desertion of European sailors and soldiers in early eighteenth-century Bengal / Titas Chakraborty -- "More dangerous for the colony than the enemy himself" : military labor, desertion, and imperial rule in French Louisiana (ca. 1715-1760) / Yevan Terrien -- "Journeying into Freedom" : traditions of desertion at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1795 / Nicole Ulrich -- Running together or running apart? Diversity, desertion and resistance in the Dutch East India Company empire, 1650-1800 / Matthias van Rossum -- Voting with their feet : absconding and labor exploitation in convict Australia / Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Mmichael Quinlan -- "He says that if he is not taught a trade, he will run away" : recaptured Africans, desertion and mobility in the British Caribbean, 1808-1828 / Anita Rossumupprecht -- Lurking but working : city maroons in antebellum New Orleans / Mary Mitchell -- Runaway slaves, vigilance committees, and the pedagogy of revolutionary abolitionism, 1835-1863 / Jesse Olsavsky.