In sum, this is a worthwhile contribution both for the wealth of detail its case studies provide and for the valuable framing of desertion, too often treated only as an aspect of military history, as a central part of labor history.
Journal of World History
These essays will be extremely useful for maritime historians both because of their ... Read moreattention to seafaring workers, and because these workers are situated within broader questions relating to early modern labour ... [This is] the strength of this book's comparative approach.
International Journal of Maritime History
This innovative collection of essays provides a fresh comparative history of desertion, through an original focus on the everyday resistance and circulation of ordinary people. Emerging from current debates in global history, and in particular new imperial histories of networks and connections, this book deserves a wide readership across social, maritime and cultural history
Clare Anderson, University of Leicester, UK
This volume offers a refreshingly new take on key themes of the global early modern era. Rather than seeing deserters as passive victims, the contributors stress the active role played by soldiers, sailors, slaves and journeymen in shaping their own lives by crossing a range of political, social and cultural boundaries. The experiences of deserters sheds light on the worlds they ran from as well as the hopes and visions they had for the future. With two incisive theoretical contributions by Alessandro Stanziani and Marcel van der Linden, both well-established and new young contributors cover a range of European and colonial societies, with a particular focus on the Dutch world.
Nigel Worden, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Desertion from bonds of employment has been a signpost for the prevalence of coercion in market-mediated labour relations throughout the modern period. The need, demonstrably felt by large numbers of workers, to break free from such relations has been mirrored by the need, felt by employers the world over, to criminalize labour mobility. The commonness of the very concept of desertion indicates that the militarization of work has not been confined to army employment: the soldier and the worker inhabit a connected social world. The present volume combines global comparison, conceptual reflection and meticulous empirical studies on the early modern world in a broadly conceived effort to understand desertion as a pattern of social behaviour emerging from within labour markets. It gauges the structural import of a phenomenon that has usually been considered only in terms of local specificity or as a contingent side-effect of larger processes. It provides rich and new material for the inconclusive historical debate on that hard-dying oxymoron, the free market .
Ravi Ahuja, University of Goettingen, Germany
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