Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance in U.S. Ports: Sailors Ashore

This book argues first, that the forces of industrialization that transformed ship technology simultaneously transformed the working-class lives of merchant seamen, intensifying class conflict and producing collective networks of subversion and resistance within the urban borderland spaces of sailortowns in which sailors fought to maintain control over their mobility, agency, and rights. Second, that given their social, cultural, economic, geographic, and legal marginalization, merchant sea...