Outsourcing African Labor: Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields Until the End of the 19th Century Hardcover - 2021

From the rear cover

The migration of Kru workers from West Africa in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, in commercial and military contexts, represents a movement of free wage labor that transformed the Kru Coast into a homeland that nurtured diasporas and staffed a vast network of workplaces. As the Kru formed permanent and transient working communities around the Atlantic and in the British Caribbean, they underwent several phases of social, political, and economic innovation. They worked for contractual periods of between six months and five years for which they were paid wages. The Kru thereby stand out as an anomaly in the history of Atlantic trade when compared with the much larger diasporas of enslaved Africans. Analyzing the Kru story relies on diverse sources including wage lists, gravestones, sketches, postcards, court records, estate records, and oral history, some presented here for the first time in a secondary source. Ultimately, Kru migratory laborers inspire a re-evaluation of concepts of labor, ethnicity, and race in the Black Atlantic and beyond.

Jeffrey Gunn recently completed his Ph.D. in History at York University. He has more than 100 publications in fields as diverse as history, travel and music.