The emergence of international capitalism depended on the creation of a highly mobile working class that built, loaded, and sailed the ships that connected the globe. These ships inaugurated the Atlantic slave trade and other labor migrations, making possible new regimes of accumulation and labor based in port cities, dynamic centers of power that linked the slave labor of colonial plantations to Europe and other parts of the world. The laborers of port cities – sailors, indentured servants, and slaves, workers free and unfree – are the subjects of this workshop.

Historians have long treated slave labor and free labor as mutually exclusive ideal types, belonging to separate historical narratives. Recent work has begun to challenge this view, yet research on the connections between free and unfree workers remains limited. Port cities are the perfect setting in which to explore a new, broader, more inclusive labor history for the period 1700-1850.