CFP: Free and Unfree Workers in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (c. 1700-1850)
The emergence of international capitalism depended on the creation of a highly mobile working class that built, loaded, and sailed the ships that connected the globe. These ships inaugurated the Atlantic slave trade and other labor migrations, making possible new regimes of accumulation and labor based in port cities, dynamic centers of power that linked the slave labor of colonial plantations to Europe and other parts of the world. The laborers of port cities - sailors, indentured servants, and slaves, workers free and unfree - are the subjects of this workshop.