A Global History of Runaways

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 labor management—which operated on a spectrum of coercive practices including slavery, indenture, and military impressment—drove workers to flee. Whenever laborers were dissatisfied with their working conditions and could organize sufficient intraclass support, they hatched plans for desertion. While doing so, they developed and implemented crucial forms of geographic, social, and political knowledge. Though these attempts to run away sometimes resulted in permanent escape, many of the stories highlighted in the volume emerge from records of the deserters’ punishment. The exercise of violence both inspired attempts at escape and often marked their defeat.Leo Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss's introduction makes a clear case for this project's original contributions to global histories of capitalism and imperialism. They sketch the contours of an important dialectical relationship between struggles for imperial sovereignty and subaltern politics that comes to life in the individual essays that follow. While, as Lucassen and van Voss maintain, historians have too often conceived of running away as an individual endeavor, the contributors foreground instances of collective desertion and the politics of solidarity that set them in motion. Together, the eleven essays paint a picture of multiethnic coalitions of workers struggling to flee a world of empires. Though the individual contributions feature scenarios from the British, Danish, Dutch, French, United States, and Portuguese empires spanning a period of more than three centuries, a striking coherence emerges across these disparate case studies. At times this coherence slips into a slight repetitiveness when the authors rehearse the broad takeaways from each of their regional cases, but the level of local detail more than sufficiently balances these broader parallels.Because the volume so successfully merges global processes with local struggles, it is sure to spark future research on topics that recur in the volume. For example, future scholarship will surely elaborate on the ways that gender and kinship shaped strategies of desertion. While Lucassen and van Ross rightly point out in their introduction that the overwhelming majority of deserters were men, the volume as a whole lacks a sustained interest in how masculinity shaped the politics of desertion. Mary Niall Mitchell's contribution, moreover, offers a rare glimpse into the experience of women who ran away. Focusing on antebellum New Orleans, Mitchell provides compelling examples of enslaved women who engaged in a form of marronage that involved blending into bustling city life and seeking opportunities to labor discreetly among the free working class. This “city marronage,” as Mitchell refers to it, attests to enslaved women's expansive community networks and desire to remedy separation from friends and family due to sale (208). Moreover, the chapter by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan on convict labor in colonial Australia sheds light on the efforts to flee undertaken by the minority of women who were imprisoned. Based on a comparative analysis of runaway notices, the authors argue that the practice of forced family separation, intended to render women more mobile for the purposes of domestic servitude, ultimately increased the rate of female desertion from Van Dieneman's Land.The chapters collectively insist on the primacy of multiethnic coalitions that supported political cultures of desertion, but additional work may expand on the important analyses that appear episodically throughout the volume. In a study focused on the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, James F. Dator notes that a 1670 law established on the island of Montserrat specifically sought to discourage interracial alliances between white servants and enslaved Africans. Moreover, Dator highlights the emergence of a specific ideology of anti-Black racism, observing that a “racial contract between big planters, small farmers, and landless white laborers offered a psychological wage large enough to reinforce the ideology of white supremacy” (66). Anita Rupprecht, in an analysis of desertion among recaptured Africans in the early nineteenth-century British Caribbean, draws attention to the importance of ethnic cleavages among African laborers. Rupprecht finds that in British Tortola, the recaptives represented “a threat to already unstable racial and social hierarchies” in the eyes of white colonials, while they were also “actively disliked by both the enslaved and the free creoles” (191). Though race was clearly central to imperial labor regimes and colonial governance, the volume offers no systemic account of precisely when and where racial difference posed an obstacle to collective desertion.Finally, legal historians will certainly take interest in the various types of laws and contracts that governed imperial labor arrangements. Rupprecht again offers useful insight here, noting the “wide variety of bonded situations” Caribbean laborers encountered (186). Likewise, Matthis van Rossum describes “a variety of laws” governing laborers in the Dutch East India Company empire that “varied from contract, to conviction, to obligated labor services” (138). Better understandings of the varied legal modes of contract and conscription that shaped imperial labor forces will sharpen the dialectical account of imperial capitalism and subaltern resistance that the very best work in this field manages to capture.Because the chapters are not organized according to subtheme—they appear in roughly chronological order—scholars with more narrowly thematic interests will need to rely on the index to guide a more targeted engagement with the individual contributions. The book also includes a helpful bibliography that points scholars working in global labor history to important works in the field. Historians of labor, migration, empire, and slavery will certainly find much to admire in this important volume. It showcases the immense rewards of scholarly collaboration and will undoubtedly prove essential for ongoing research and teaching in the field

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