Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea

Abstract

Both an essential national resource and members of a transnational group of skilled laboring men, sailors played an important but troublesome role in early modern Britain's rise to global commercial and military power. Historians have studied how the state and merchant employers sought to mobilize and control their labor, how sailors responded, and how “Britishness” was defined at sea. Three intertwined strands of analysis – labor history, sailors and the state, and the interaction between racial, gendered, religious, and professional identities at sea – dominate the historiography, with the 18th‐century Atlantic receiving the bulk of scholarly attention. This article surveys the field and suggests that a wider geographical and chronological scope is needed to recapture sailors' bottom‐up perspective on early modern British capitalism and empire.

Racial capitalism and the sea: Development and change in Black maritime labour, and what it means for fisheries and a blue economy

“…Rediker’s emphasis corresponds with a great deal of historical scholarship that highlights the importance of maritime, racial subjugation for capital accumulation and nation‐state formation around the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism (Campling & Colás, 2021; Linebaugh and Rediker, 1990, 2000; Rodney, 2018; Williams, 1944). For example, racialization of work hierarchies at sea increased exploitation and diminished working‐class solidarity for Indian sailors at the hands of British colonialism and Chinese sailors operating out of Pacific ports of the western North American continent (Grider, 2010; Hubbard, 2016).…”