Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Seafaring Labour : The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914
ISBN: 9780773561823
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / McGill-Queen''s University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Business/ Management; Social Science;

Sager argues that sailors were not misfits or outcasts but were divorced from society only by virtue of their occupation. The wooden ships were small communities at sea, fragments of normal society where workers lived, struggled, and often died. With the coming of the age of steam, the sailor became part of a new division of labour and a new social hierarchy at sea. Sager shows that the sailor was as integral to the transition to industrial capitalism as any land worker.

Eric W. Sager is professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria.