Law, Labour and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800 ed. by Maria Fusaro et al. (review)

The sixteen essays that make up Law, Labour and Empire testify to the unique position of seafarers in the early modern world, and of European seafarers in particular. Indeed, by the sixteenth century, European-based shipping was acting as midwife to the first global empires while at the same time facilitating biological and cultural exchanges the world over. The daily lives of many seafarers had thus become highly mobile, transgressing established legal, economic, and political borders with regularity. And it was through these frequent transgressions that seamen established their own social space and the early modern world was given shape. To be clear, the editors of this essay collection do not seek to offer a global study of seafarers in the early modern age, not by any means. Rather, Law, Labour and Empire puts forth what could best be described as a globally minded, archive-based consideration of the experiences of seamen during the rise of Northern European shipping from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The growing influence of Dutch, English, Hanseatic, and other northern shipping economies within southern ports serves as the larger context for the majority of the essays presented here.

All told, there are eighteen different scholars represented in this volume, most all of whom put forth rigorous, original research in many languages. The contributors themselves comprise a similarly diverse range. Included are works by recent PhDs as well as established scholars in the field of early modern maritime history. Bringing together such a range of work can often result in a disjointed reading experience, but here the straightforward organizational structure of the volume, with its three sets of related essays on the topics of law, labor, and empire, is helpful.

Part 1, “Seamen and Law,” offers a number of highly focused studies on the experience of Northern European seamen in Mediterranean courts of law. It is made clear that not only were seafarers active and successful litigators in ports throughout Northern and Southern Europe, but, more importantly, courts of law habitually deferred to the customs of seafarers, thus giving shape to a nascent body of maritime law. Joan Abela’s essay on Maltese court proceedings and Richard J. Blakemore’s on “The Legal World of English Sailors” together offer perhaps the clearest accounts in this regard, illustrating how foreign seamen, through frequent wage and contract disputes, successfully established their own legal space across multiple legal jurisdictions. Those familiar with the field will be pleased to see that a number of these essays directly engage with the works of historians Lauren Benton and Marcus Rediker. Blakemore’s essay in particular takes Rediker lightly to task for being overly negative in his interpretation of English seafarers’ relationship with the law. While it is largely left to the reader to tease out an overarching thesis, one could easily regard these essays as being an attempt to overturn the (mis)conception of early modern seafarers as having been overburdened by or constrained by the all-powerful law of the state. Or, as Abela states, “law emerged more from the practice of merchants than from imposed legal codes” (p. 69).

Seamen demonstrated their agency not only in courts of law but in the labor market as well. The essays comprising part 2, “Seamen and Labour,” explore the micro- and macroeconomic aspects of seafarers as highly sought-after labor resources. Here we see that the mobility inherent in maritime professions, combined with the growing importance of shipping to Northern European commercial and state interests, resulted in abundant opportunities for advancement among the ranks of seafarers. To take just one example, chapter 9, “Mobility, Migration and Human Capital in the Long Eighteenth Century,” offers a particularly revealing microhistory of the remarkable career arc of Joseph Anton Ponsaing, an eighteenth-century German-born émigré to Denmark who advanced to...