Law, Labour, and Empire Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500-1800 [Hardcover]

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.List of Figures, Maps, and Tables Notes on Contributors Introduction; Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, and Tijl Vanneste 1. Overview: Trades, Ports and Ships: The Roots of Difference in Sailors' Lives; Richard W. Unger PART I: SAILORS AND LAW 2. The Invasion of Northern Litigants: English and Dutch Seamen in Mediterranean Courts of Law; Maria Fusaro 3. Until the Very Last Nail: English Seafaring and Wage Litigation in Seventeenth-Century Livorno; Andrea Addobbati 4. Sailors' Legal Rights in a Mediterranean Hub: the Case of Malta; Joan Abela 5. Between Ol?ron and Colbert: The Evolution of French Maritime Law until the Seventeenth Century; Bernard Allaire 6. The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575-1729; Richard J. Blakemore PART II: SAILORS AND LABOUR 7. Sailing through the Strait: Seamen's Professional Trajectories from a Segmented Labour Market in Holland to a Fragmented Mediterranean; Tijl Vanneste 8. The Hanseatics in Southern Europe: Structure and Payment of German Long-Distance Shipping, 1630-1700; Magnus Ressel 9. Mobility, Migration and Human Capital in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Lil#i