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.

About the Author

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Titas Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University.

Matthias van Rossum is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

List of Illustrations and Tables

Introduction: Flight as Fight
Leo Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss

1. Runaways and Deserters in the Early Modern Portuguese Empire: The Examples of São Tomé Island, South Asia, and Southern Portugal
Timothy Coates
2. Escaping St. Thomas: Class Relations and Convict Strategies in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1687
Johan Heinsen
3. Between the Mountains and the Sea: Knowledge, Networks, and Transimperial Desertion in the Leeward Archipelago, 1627–1727
James F. Dator
4. Desertion of European Sailors and Soldiers in Early Eighteenth- Century Bengal
Titas Chakraborty
5. “More of a Danger to the Colony Than the Enemy Himself ”: Military Labor, Desertion, and Imperial Rule in French Louisiana (ca. 1715–1760)
Yevan Terrien
6. “Journeying into Freedom”: Traditions of Desertion at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1795
Nicole Ulrich
7. Running Together or Running Apart? Diversity, Desertion, and Resistance in the Dutch East India Company Empire, 1650–1800
Matthias van Rossum
8. Voting with Their Feet: Absconding and Labor Exploitation in Convict Australia
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan
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
Anita Rupprecht
10. Lurking but Working: City Maroons in Antebellum New Orleans
Mary Niall Mitchell
11. Runaway Slaves, Vigilance Committees, and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1863
Jesse Olsavsky

Selected References
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index

Reviews

"This remarkable collection of case studies extends the field of global migration history. Highly recommended."
— CHOICE

"A great read, drawing its strengths from a global comparative approach and well-researched empirical case studies. It will have a significant impact on research on coerced labourers around the world and their responses to their treatment."
— Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History

“Innovative in method and original in its findings, this is a well-written collection that hangs together stylistically, from start to finish.”—Rick Halpern, coauthor of Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid

“This highly original collection traverses a range of contexts that will appeal to readers interested in how working people resisted and subverted the demands of labor and capital across the early-modern world.”—Clare Anderson, editor of A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies and author of Subaltern Lives

“This superb and ambitious collection will prove to be a landmark work in advancing the field of global labor history."—Julie Greene, author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal

“A Global History of Runaways is a major contribution to a new global history from below. Empire and capital across the modern era sought to constrain people to work or fight in their interests. Kidnapped, pressed and enslaved men and women replied by seizing freedom with their feet and wits."—Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London

“Runaways were the individual escapees who did their part in the collective response of captive laborers, caught in the oppressive conditions of the colonies and plantations that were essential to creating the world economy. These chapters by skilled historians tell the individual tales of imagination and energy among the runaways, yet show the price paid by those caught in the tentacles of empire in its service to building capitalism.”—Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews