A Global History of Runaways

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.
 

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