Titas Chakraborty & Matthias van Rossum 
A Global History of Runaways 
Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850

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.
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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.

 

Table of Content

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

About the author

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.