Forging Laboring Identities in the Atlantic World

This panel examines how sailors, citizens, and ship masters used labor practices, both their own and their perceptions of others, to forge gendered, classed, and national identities in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Recent work in business history has explored how business models with their own core values shift existing modes of identity. These business values challenge some identities while validating others. In the Atlantic world, as mercantile men and women expanded trade, they created a set of new tensions around laboring identities. Increasingly, people like sailors, captains, and merchants found emancipatory identity through their work, which earned them respect and income. At the same time, they came to believe their labor set them apart from people in marked categories. This panel explores how Atlantic people began using their interpretations of the intrinsic value of their own labor to bolster the cultural value of their own work and diminish other kinds of work and laborers.