As European empires expanded across the globe beginning in the seventeenth century, their efforts to extract profit from vast overseas territories prompted innovations in the exercise of control over laboring populations. Examining the ways that workers within these vast imperial networks reclaimed their autonomy through desertion, A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850 marks an important contribution to the project of crafting a global history from below. Coeditors Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum have assembled a collection of eleven essays that survey the cutting edge of global labor history from a wide range of imperial and geographic perspectives and provide case studies of worker desertion in imperial territories spanning Africa, South Asia, Australia, North America, and the Caribbean through the middle of the nineteenth century.
The central aim of the volume is to demonstrate that early modern imperial capitalism and its attendant strategies of...
