Review by Choice Review
The 11 essays in this text closely analyze the local, imperial, and environmental conditions that compelled workers--European and non-European--to escape coercive labor regimes in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia between 1600 and 1850. Globalized capitalism and European expansion at the time produced not just centralized bureaucracies, profitable plantations, and massive empires, but also patterns of "proletarian" resistance in the form of desertion. Though Maroons, exoticized in resistance literature, are the most obvious example, they comprise just one revolutionary collective that self-consciously escaped bondage. Across European colonies, groups of laborers fled miserable conditions to better their status and expand their freedom. Seventeenth-century Portugese soldiers, valued for their knowledge of firearms and cannons, ran away to work as mercenaries in Asian armies. In the 19th century, Louisiana slaves disappeared into the free colored population in New Orleans. Indistinguishable in race from the free population, Australian convicts fled brutal road gangs, exploiting labor shortages on whalers and merchant vessels. Taking advantage of wartime confusion and exploiting imperial rivalries, runaways, as a class, disrupted well-planned capitalist projects as much as did outright rebellion. This remarkable collection of case studies extends the field of global migration history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Ruma Chopra, San Jose State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
