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Seafaring Workers of the World Unite!

As Robert Albion once said, the problem for maritime historians is to make it respectable in academic circles.1 Maritime history has largely been an outlier within the profession, with a few notable exceptions. With some reason, it has been regarded as of marginal importance, a somewhat arcane and obscure field often pursued without intellectual rigor. On occasion, scholars have declared it dead; but here we have evidence of its continued vitality, as Leon Fink—a truly eminent labor historian—takes up Albion’s challenge with his take on the treatment of maritime labor from the late eighteenth century to the present. Fink comes from a tradition of leftist scholars who have challenged and invigorated maritime history. The intellectual roots of maritime history as practiced in the United States were largely conservative. Ironically, for an industry that is international almost by definition, its historians initially were attached to place and a hierarchical outlook that favored shipmasters and owners over ordinary mariners. These early maritime histories were connected to a narrative of a rising white America and thus were nationalistic in outlook, when they were not merely provincial, and almost always focused on the allegedly romantic—or at least exoticized—age of sail. The prime examples of this older genre of maritime history are Samuel Eliot Morison’s beautifully written Maritime History of Massachusetts (1921) and Robert Albion’s The Rise of New York Port (1939). But Marxist historian Jesse Lemisch seized upon the subject and inverted it with his truly seminal 1968 article “Jack Tar in the Street,” which took a “bottom-up” view of maritime history and marked an important moment in the development of social history. Lemisch was followed by other left-leaning scholars such as Marcus Rediker, with his seminal 1989 work on Anglo-American sailors entitled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and Bruce Nelson’s Workers on the Waterfront, which began to crack open the twentieth-century experience of maritime workers. Fink joins this crowd of notable maritime historians in his latest work, Sweatshops at Sea, bridging the gaps between the age of sail and the age of engines, the era of empires