THE ATLANTIC ROOTS OF WORKING-CLASS INTERNATIONALISM:
A HISTORICAL RE-INTERPRETATION
THIERRY DRAPEAU


https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/29972/Drapeau_Thierry_2014_PhD.pdf?sequence=2

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
YORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO
2014

Abstract

This dissertation offers a historical re-interpretation of working-class internationalism by
situating its development within the early modern Atlantic-world economy (c. 1600-
1830). Through an exploration of various moments of insurgency and revolt of an
emerging Atlantic class of workers, among them slaves, sailors, servants, and others, it
demonstrates that profound and decisive traditions of proletarian solidarity across borders
existed prior to the nineteenth-century classical age of working-class internationalism. In
doing so, this dissertation alters the prevailing standpoint of the free, white, waged,
industrial worker of Europe by bringing in that narrative the agency of the unfree, black
(and racialized), wageless, plantation-slave worker of the Americas. Underpinning this
intervention is a more generous and complex understanding of capitalism as a mode of
production inclusive of unfree forms of labour.

In order to recover and foreground early formative moments of working-class
internationalism in the Atlantic-world economy, this dissertation proposes to re-theorize
this development in terms of processes of transboundary proletarian solidarity in a longue
durée frame. Rooted in a multidisciplinary framework of analysis situated at the
intersection of Historical Sociology, Global Labour History, Atlantic Studies, and Social
History, this strategy has allowed me to illuminate two world-significant moments of
proletarian solidarity played out across colonial and imperial borders. The first is golden
age piracy (1714-26), when thousands of insurgent seafaring workers of all nationalities
revolted against capitalist exploitation at sea and took possession of their ships,
instituting their own self-governments and creating multicrew alliances against imperial 
navies. The second moment expressing a durable process of transboundary proletarian
solidarity is offered by the Saint-Domingue revolution (1791-1804), when thousands of
African slaves rose up to overthrow slavery, leading to the formation of the first
independent black republic in the Americas. This dissertation highlights that during the
revolution, underground channels of communication entertained by black sailors and
corsairs linked revolutionary Saint-Domingue to other slave revolts elsewhere in the
Atlantic world, which cumulated in, and intersected with, the wake of working-class
internationalism during the 1848 revolutions in Europe.