Friday, January 5, 2018: 3:50 PM
Thurgood Marshall South (Marriott Wardman Park)
Historians studying globalization have tended to study it "top-down" since the days of Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, and Earl Hamilton. The focus on elite communication networks has highlighted imperial rivalries and concomitant exchanges between political agents, merchant capitalists, and, of course, literate travellers. Archival and printed evidence for these encounters demonstrates that states, societies, and cultures have not "encountered" each other as wholes, but rather fractionally, when frontline individuals experienced fragmented contact as small groups. As a consequence of these two factors, we have become accustomed historiographically to assuming that most information---and the most important information---circulated from "top" to "top" or from the "top down," rarely from the "bottom up." However, the more recent work of social and labour historians as well as scholars in Feminist and Postcolonial theory has recovered unheard or underappreciated voices---evidence of fractional connections---by reading against or beside the "archival grain." This paper explores the thesis that the maritime working-class environment was early globalization's most important socio-economic contact zone by examining evidence that processes of information exchange happened most often and perhaps most importantly between the 1400s and 1800s fractionally, amongst sailors; that is---applying the vertical metaphor for social segments---from "bottom" to "bottom." As occupational vectors of maritime globalization, the world's sailors and maritime predators created and participated in job-seeking and prey-seeking information networks. It has not been sufficiently acknowledged that these functioned as precursors of the transnational experience of sustained but fragmented encounters that steam shipping in the 1800s and then air travel in the 1950s democratized for the world's non-mariner populations as mass migration and then mass tourism.