Law, Labour, and Empire ─ Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500-1800

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.

Maria Fusaro is Associate Professor (Reader) in Early Modern European History at the University of Exeter, UK, where she directs the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies. She is the author of Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England 1450-1700 (2015).

Bernard Allaire is a Canadian historian living in France, associated with the CMMC (University Of Nice). He is the author of Pelleteries, manchons et chapeaux de castor, (1999) Crepuscules ultramontains: marchands italiens et grand commerce a Bordeaux au XVIe siecle (2008) and La Rumeur Doree (2013).

Richard Blakemore specialises in early modern British social and maritime history. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, UK, having studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, and worked at the University of Exeter. He has published on navigational culture and the role of seafarers in the British civil wars of the 1640s.

Tijl Vanneste works mainly on global history in the early modern period. He is interested in international commerce, migration, diaspora and Brazil. He currently works as researcher at the University of Exeter, UK and is also attached to Universite Paris-VII Diderot, France and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has published a monograph on early modern diamond trade.