A Global History of Runaways

Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850

Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, Matthias van Rossum, Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, Matthias van Rossum

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520973060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

During global capitalism'slong 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 G l oba l H ist o ry o f 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• A Global History of Runaways
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Introduction: Flight as Fight
• 1. Runaways and Deserters in the Early Modern Portuguese Empire: The Examples of São Tomé Island, South Asia, and Southern Portugal
• 2. Escaping St. Thomas: Class Relations and Convict Strategies in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1687
• 3. Between the Mountains and the Sea: Knowledge, Networks, and Transimperial Desertion in the Leeward Archipelago, 1627–1727
• 4. Desertion of European Sailors and Soldiers in Early Eighteenth-Century Bengal
• 5. “More of a Danger to the Colony Than the Enemy Himself”: Military Labor, Desertion, and Imperial Rule in French Louisiana (ca. 1715–1760)
• 6. “Journeying into Freedom”: Traditions of Desertion at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1795
• 7. Running Together or Running Apart? Diversity, Desertion, and Resistance in the Dutch East India Company Empire, 1650–1800
• 8. Voting with Their Feet: Absconding and Labor Exploitation in Convict Australia
• 9. “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
• 10. Lurking but Working: City Maroons in Antebellum New Orleans
• 11. Runaway Slaves, Vigilance Committees, and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1863
• Selected References
• Contributors
• Illustration Credits
• Index