In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History ed. by Matthias van Rossum, Jeannette Kamp
  • Peter A. Coclanis
Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History. Edited by Matthias van Rossum and Jeannette Kamp (New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) 213pp. $112.00 cloth $29.95 paper

Until relatively recently, deserters in past times, with the exception of runaway slaves, have generally received bad scholarly press. Why? Acts of desertion—the abandonment of “duty” without permission—often suggest moral dereliction, and, thus, the repudiation of widely valorized [End Page 400] qualities, like loyalty and faithfulness, that are integral to, and privileged by, the family, organized religion, and the state.

During the last few generations in the United States—beginning with the war in Vietnam—views of deserters and desertion have become both more complex and more indulgent, if not forgiving. Indeed, today the U.S. Army—to cite but one institutional example—rarely takes desertion cases to court, preferring to handle them in less fraught ways. Scholars have also changed their approaches to the study of desertion, viewing it in less value-laden and more deeply contextualized ways. They are more apt to see it now as an expression of, or a response to, institutional relationships of one form or another—whether familial, occupational, statal, or parastatal—deemed unbearably challenging or arduous.

Desertion in the Early Modern World is an exemplar of this new approach. The contributors to the volume, which was ably edited and introduced by Van Rossum and Kamp, treat desertion in the context of labor relations, defining the act as “unpermitted absence from work” (5). The authors conceive of work and labor relations broadly; individual chapters describe desertion for a disparate group of “workers”—soldiers and military personnel, merchant seamen, serfs, slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and contract laborers—all over the world during the early modern period.

Six of the eight chapters included in Desertion in the Early Modern World are case studies, focusing largely, though not exclusively, on desertion/deserters operating in Dutch and Dutch colonial arenas.The other two chapters (one by Alessandro Stanziani and the other by Marcel van der Linden) attempt to sketch in a preliminary way the broader patterns informing desertion qua global phenomenon during the period. Although the synthetic essays and the case studies make a number of important points, two are especially noteworthy: (1) the persistent pattern of relatively high levels of desertion among social groups in a variety of work settings throughout the early modern period and (2) the connection between the pervasiveness of desertion and the extremely high levels of coercion and exploitation characteristic of labor relations in many economic activities during the same period.

Many of the questions relating to desertion and deserters during this period still remain open, but this short volume represents an important first step in structuring and advancing our understanding of the key issues involved.

Peter A. Coclanis
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
...

pdf

Share