2. Escaping St. Thomas: Class Relations and Convict Strategies in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1687

Kirti Durelle on spaces of desertion and the historical architecture of class formation - A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism 1600–1850 Edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, Matthias van Rossum Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019 275 pp. 6 maps, 18 b/w illustrations, 5 tables Paperback: 9780520304369 £27

“…10 Indeed, 'capitalism was not forged from dreams of free markets, but from visions of chains.' 11 As for the workers, their acts of desertion, especially in organised groups, demonstrated the solidarities forged among shared toil aboard ships, in workshops or on plantations, and were fledgling expressions of a global workingclass consciousness. Several chapters demonstrate how these bonds of cooperation transcended worker status, cultural boundaries, and ethnic and racialised differences: 'underlying solidarities needed to emerge within a highly global and multicultural workforce', 12 and escapes and mutiny 'suggest that differences among workers did not of resistance, A Global History of Runaways makes a considerable effort in producing a wide-ranging historical account of the phenomenon across various worker groups, giving attention to the conditions that fostered or impeded class solidarity.…”