Sweatshops at Sea - by Leon Fink (Paperback)

About the Book

Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present

Book Synopsis

As the main artery of international commerce, merchant shipping was the world's first globalized industry, often serving as a vanguard for issues touching on labor recruiting, the employment relationship, and regulatory enforcement that crossed national borders. In Sweatshops at Sea, historian Leon Fink examines the evolution of laws and labor relations governing ordinary seamen over the past two centuries.

The merchant marine offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers by the United States, Great Britain, and, ultimately, an organized world community. Fink explores both how political and economic ends are reflected in maritime labor regulations and how agents of reform--including governments, trade unions, and global standard-setting authorities--grappled with the problems of applying land-based, national principles and regulations of labor discipline and management to the sea-going labor force. With the rise of powerful nation-states in a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a mercantile labor force emerged as a high priority and as a vexing problem for Western powers. The history of exploitation, reform, and the evolving international governance of sea labor offers a compelling precedent in an age of more universal globalization of production and services.

Review Quotes

[Fink] writes with grace, humor and wit, and deftly skewers the academic jargon so many maritime historians use. . . . A polished academic work that will feature prominently at seminar tables and the bookshelves of the learned public as well.--Sea History

[This book] does an excellent job of exploring the tensions between maritime matters as part of a decidedly national project but composed of globalized, transnational workers.--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

A history that is both a detailed and specific account of a particular labour force, and simultaneously an account of the changes that have transformed the maritime working world over the past 200 years. It is an exemplary study.--Labour History

A meaningful contribution to labor and maritime history. . . . The future of maritime workers is hard to see. Their past, however, has never been so clear.--Journal of World History

A professional piece of work and a contribution to the field.--Labor

An original, engaging, witty, and, yes, important study of seafarers and their struggle for improved working conditions. . . . This is truly an important book, and a well-written one.--Sea History

Anyone studying the often romanticized, but realistically complex and difficult world of seafarers, needs to start with this book. It lays a fine framework from which to begin such a study.--The Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians

Fink helps us think about the historical roots of these limitations as we strive, as citizens as well as historians, to shape a more humane world.--Journal of American History

Social historians of the sea will find much in this monograph with which to engage.--International Journal of Maritime History

This book stands as a very successful model of global history.--The Historian