I am glad to invite you to a workshop entitled “Maritime labour practices in colonial contexts”. In a small audience in person, but hopefully joined by a wider digital audience, a number of historians and scholars will come and share their research together.
Starting with Marcus Rediker’s and Peter Linebaugh’s Many headed Hydra (2000), the past decades have brought a number of scholarships and disciplines to analyze the diverse maritime working conditions across Time, Oceans, and Globe. The emerging field of Global and Maritime History demonstrated the mobility and importance of those, who crucially filled the ships. Depending on the purpose of the voyage, working and living circumstances at sea changed and differed dramatically.
The diverse purposes of voyages influenced the socialization and consistency of the crew, as they were isolated from mainland systems of society, government, work, and leisure. For several years, a pelagic-whaling ship, which required frequent stopovers, had different necessities as a trade ship. Both the composition of a crew and the hierarchies of a Convict ship might have been different, compared to a Royal Navy Ship.
These different circumstances mirrored in the wage-system too. Facing a several-year absence from home and family, whalers needed a payment in advance to sustain their families. Ships on the American continent became places of hope for slaves who were escaping.
The purpose of this workshop is to highlight and reveal these different conditions and to bring together scholars from diverse disciplines and areas to engage in a dialogue about the results of their research.
You can find the full program here. If you are interested in participating in person or online, please contact me at hussein@uni-trier.de