Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (1700–1850)

Examines gender, race and status to present a vibrant picture of social relations and working-class cultures in port cities.

Pepijn Brandon (Edited by), Niklas Frykman (Edited by), Pernille Røge (Edited by)

9781108708562, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 June 2019

266 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.39 kg

Colonial and post-colonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions brought together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses - legally free or semi-free wage-laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the labor of these 'motley crews' made port cities crucial hubs of the emerging capitalist world market and centers of imperial infrastructure. The nine chapters in this volume investigate the interaction between different groups of laborers around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. How did the mixture of many different groups of laborers shape patterns of work and life, authority and control, exclusion and inclusion, group-competition and joint resistance? What roles did gender, race and status play in maintaining divisions or enabling solidarities? Together, the nine case studies present a vibrant picture of social relations and working-class cultures in port cities.

Introduction. Free and unfree labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean port cities (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) Pepijn Brandon, Niklas Frykman and Pernille Røge
1. Labouring transformations of amphibious monsters: exploring early modern globalization, diversity, and shifting clusters of labour relations in the context of the Dutch East India Company (1600–1800) Matthias van Rossum
2. History below the waterline: enslaved salvage divers harvesting seaports' hinter-seas in the early modern Atlantic Kevin Dawson
3. The household workers of the East India Company ports of pre-colonial Bengal Titas Chakraborty
4. Between the plantation and the port: racialization and social control in eighteenth-century Paramaribo Pepijn Brandon
5. Securing trade: the military labor of the British occupation of Manila, 1762–1764 Megan C. Thomas
6. The path to sweet success: free and unfree labor in the building of roads and rails in Havana, Cuba, 1790–1835 Evelyn P. Jennings
7. Liberated Africans, slaves, and convict labor in the construction of Rio de Janeiro's Casa de Correção: Atlantic labor regimes and confinement in Brazil's port city Martine Jean
8. Convicts, commodities, and connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789–1866 Clare Anderson
9. Street food, urban space, and gender: working on the streets of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro (1830–1870) Melina Teubner
10. Afterword: reflections on the motley crew as port city proletariat Marcus Rediker.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Maritime history [HBTM], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]