Kirti Durelle on spaces of desertion and the historical architecture of class formation

Abstract

Edited by three historians of varying seniority,1 A Global History of Runaways provides an overview of worker desertions in European imperial territories during the early modern period. Encompassing a range of worker types (slaves, indentured workers, wage workers, convicts and penal labourers, sailors and soldiers, domestic servants, and agricultural workers), the eleven essays outline the experiences and coercive labour conditions that compelled them to abscond from their circumscribed positions, and the effects of desertion on developing capitalist organisation. What is common to the various categories of workers represented in the volume is their labour power in the vast projects of European states’ imperial expansion, often via the East and West India Companies – corporations acting as the vehicles of early capitalist production and trade in the colonies [1]. The historical context of the essays is ‘the establishment of European empires and the rise of capitalism around the globe beginning in the sixteenth century’, two ‘entwined processes [that] created multiple labour regimes’.2 The Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danish India Companies feature prominently as the dominant force in coercive labour relations, as do military and police institutions, local colonial governments, colonial planters, and slave owners. Though perhaps not immediately apparent, this web of colonial agents commanded a tremendous amount of labour power. Taking, for example, the Dutch East India Company (or VOC): Throughout its Eurasian empire, the VOC employed large numbers of sailors, soldiers and other workers engaged in construction, maintenance, warfare, control, and the production and transport and goods. At its height in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Company directly employed some 57,000 workers.3 Texts in this volume share a commitment to studying the historical agencies of these ‘...spatial relationships between escapees and the territories they were fleeing ...’