Desertion in the Early Modern World A Comparative History

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.

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.

1. Introduction: Leaving work across the world (Matthias van Rossum, International Institute of Social History and Jeannette Kamp, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands)
Part I: Desertion in global history
2. Desertion and work - reflections from a global labour history perspective (Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen (International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands)
3. Running as a strategy - desertion and global revolts (Marcus Rediker, World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, USA)
4. Labour, control and punishment (Alessandro Stanziani, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, Paris)
Part II: The Atlantic
5. Networks of Desertion: the case of Germany and the United Provinces 1600-1800 (Jeannette Kamp, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands)
6. Desertion in the Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800 (Karwan Fatah-Black, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands)
7. Countering desertion in the Dutch Atlantic: forms of management and labor control compared
(Pepijn Brandon, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Part III: Eurasia
8. 'Working for the Devil'. Desertion from the Dutch East India Company in Europe and Asia
(Matthias van Rossum, International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands)
9. Making for the hills? Slave runaways from the eighteenth-century Cape and Colombo (Kate Ekama, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands)
10. Desertion in the East India Company settlements in Bengal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Titas Chakraborty, World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Part IV: Ways forward
11. Concluding remarks - studying desertion (Matthias van Rossum, International Institute of Social History and Jeannette Kamp, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands)
Bibliography
Index

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