Bloomsbury Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History

Product Description Early modern globalization was built on a highly labour intensive infrastructure. This book looks at the millions of workers who were needed to operate the ships, ports, store houses, forts and factories crucial to local and global exchange. These sailors, soldiers, craftsmen and slaves were crucial to globalization but were also confronted with the process of globalization themselves. They were often migrants who worked, directly or indirectly, for trading companies, merchants and producers that tried to discipline and control their labour force. The contributors to this volume offer an integrated, thematic study of the global history of desertion in European, Atlantic and Asian contexts. By tracing and comparing acts and patterns of desertion across empires, economic systems, regions and types of workers, Desertion in the Early Modern World illuminates the crucial role of practices of desertion among workers in shaping the history of imperial and economic expansion in the early modern period. Review This innovative collection of essays provides a fresh comparative history of desertion, through an original focus on the everyday resistance and circulation of ordinary people. Emerging from current debates in global history, and in particular new imperial histories of networks and connections, this book deserves a wide readership across social, maritime and cultural history --Clare Anderson, University of Leicester, UKThis volume offers a refreshingly new take on key themes of the global early modern era. Rather than seeing deserters as passive victims, the contributors stress the active role played by soldiers, sailors, slaves and journeymen in shaping their own lives by crossing a range of political, social and cultural boundaries. The experiences of deserters sheds light on the worlds they ran from as well as the hopes and visions they had for the future. With two incisive theoretical contributions by Alessandro Stanziani and Marcel van der Linden, both well-established and new young contributors cover a range of European and colonial societies, with a particular focus on the Dutch world. --Nigel Worden, University of Cape Town, South AfricaDesertion from bonds of employment has been a signpost for the prevalence of coercion in market-mediated labour relations throughout the modern period. The need, demonstrably felt by large numbers of workers, to break free from such relations has been mirrored by the need, felt by employers the world over, to criminalize labour mobility. The commonness of the very concept of """"desertion"""" indicates that the militarization of work has not been confined to army employment: the soldier and the worker inhabit a connected social world. The present volume combines global comparison, conceptual reflection and meticulous empirical studies on the early modern world in a broadly conceived effort to understand """"desertion"""" as a pattern of social behaviour emerging from within labour markets. It gauges the structural import of a phenomenon that has usually been considered only in terms of local specificity or as a contingent side-effect of larger processes. It provides rich and new material for the inconclusive historical debate on that hard-dying oxymoron, the """"free market"""". --Ravi Ahuja, University of Göttingen, Germany About the Author Matthias van Rossum is a researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and Lecturer in history at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Jeannette Kamp is a researcher at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.