Law, Labour, and Empire

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.

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.

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 q?ng Afterword;Maria Fusaro General Bibliography