Mercantile Exchanges, Mercantilist Enclosures: Racial Capitalism in the Black Mariner Narratives of Venture Smith and John Jea

Recent historical research has documented the striking rise of black men employed in seafaring industries on the North Atlantic during the eighteenth century, and their similarly striking decline during the nineteenth century. 3 Between 1740 and 1820, we see large numbers of North Atlantic black men, both free and enslaved, going to sea as common sailors, and occasionally as mates and captains. This rise is also reflected in black Atlantic literature, as nearly every text written during this period plots labor on the deep sea or coastal waters. 4 Both these recent historical studies and the black Atlantic literature indicate that eighteenth-century sea labor was not as racially hierarchized as shore labor. In fact, the dramatic increase in legal and extra-legal racism in North America during the eighteenth century seems to have pushed many black men and women to coastal urban centers where women could obtain shore work and men could go to sea, together forming strong social, political, and economic units in the orbit of sea ports. 5